


The Corruption of Captain America by the Villain Tony Stark

by ladililn



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (or is he), Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angry Steve Rogers, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Armor Kink, Artist Steve Rogers, Counselor Sam Wilson, Dating, Enemies to Lovers, Enemy Lovers, Flirting, Getting Together, Identity Porn, Iron Man Suit Kink, M/M, POV Steve Rogers, Post-Avengers (2012), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romantic Comedy, Secret Identity, Secret Relationship, Some Plot, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Steve's Army Uniform, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Villain Tony Stark, aggressively pretends it's still 2012, fun sexy kidnapping, keeps trying to be a songfic, secretly a fix-it fic, systematically defiling every US landmark, ~butterfly meme~ Tony Stark: /looks at supervillainy/ Tony Stark: is this flirting?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-26
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:13:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 38,084
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23853628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladililn/pseuds/ladililn
Summary: Iron Man paused. “Oh my god. You thought I was a robot.”“No, I—” Steve felt his face flushing. “I…considered the possibility,” he admitted.“You thought I was arobotwho’s beenhitting on you.”“Is that really so crazy?” Steve felt an inexplicable need to defend himself. “In the forties, I fought a Nazi with a skull for a head.”
Relationships: Iron Man Armor/Steve Rogers, Steve Rogers & Avengers Team, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 370
Kudos: 612





	1. let's misbehave

**Author's Note:**

> do you ever open a document from 2012 containing half a dozen scattered scenes that range from fairly sketched out to literally one line of dialogue with absolutely no context to clue you in on what it might once have referred to? and do you ever think, in 2020, hey, maybe I should write this?
> 
> no I haven't emotionally developed or progressed at all in eight years thanks for asking

“Here’s the plan,” Natasha said. “We head to that Thai place by your apartment to celebrate mission success, then I pretend to get an urgent call from Fury. Bam—you’re on a date.”

“I don’t _want_ to be on a date,” Steve said, glancing toward the cockpit to make sure Maria couldn’t hear.

“Why not? She’s a no-nonsense ass-kicking brunette in the military. I’ve done my research. That’s exactly your type.”

“I’m not sure you can declare a type based off one example,” Steve said drily.

“I’m open to further input,” Natasha allowed, kicking a leg up on the table. “Describe to me your ideal romantic partner. What do they look like? What’s their background? What sort of path are they on?”

 _I’m on the highway to hell!_ the speakers blared. _On the highway to hell!_

Natasha, shifting from smirking to businesslike faster than Steve could grasp what was happening, was already heading for the cockpit. He hastily followed.

“It just started playing,” Maria said, jabbing at buttons and flipping switches on the flight panel to obviously no avail. The music—as Steve had come to recognize it was, after a somewhat jarring first encounter with what Clint had assured him was “basically the Sinatra of the eighties”—was loud and all-encompassing, emanating from every corner of the quinjet.

“Iron Man,” Natasha said.

“Black Widow,” said a voice over the music, which dropped in volume in perfect sync. “Did you miss me?”

A gleaming red figure appeared in front of the windshield just as the music ratcheted back up on the line _Hey mama, look at me_. One of his glowing eyes winked.

“Captain,” Maria said, sudden urgency coloring her voice. The screen in front of her had switched from declaring _PA SYSTEM OVERRIDE_ to _FLIGHT CONTROL OVERRIDE_. Iron Man had dropped back out of sight.

Natasha took Maria’s place in the copilot’s seat; both women worked swiftly at the controls. Steve cleared his throat and spoke loudly. “Iron Man.”

The music politely receded again at Steve’s words. “Captain,” Iron Man said. “I thought the quinjet was flying straighter and more true than usual. Must be all that patriotism.”

“What do you want?”

“God, I thought you’d never ask. Let’s see. I’d like a pony. A million dollars. World peace, of course. And…you. What do you say, let me take you out?”

He appeared in front of the quinjet again, somehow managing to lean against the windshield like a quarterback crowding his girlfriend up against a locker despite the near-supersonic speeds at which they were traveling.

Natasha swiveled the Gatling gun around and fired. Iron Man barely managed to dodge the hail of bullets. He dropped back and flew over the top of the jet, where the weapons couldn’t reach.

 _ALL CONTROLS OVERRIDE_ , the screen announced.

“Where are you taking us?” Steve strode back to the main cabin. A jump and a twist, and the ceiling hatch swung open to blue sky and screaming wind.

“How about Seattle? The Space Needle? They’ve got a cozy little restaurant up there, very romantic. Gives you a 360-degree view of the whole city. If I make reservations now you can be eating lobster off my fork in twenty minutes.”

Steve hoisted himself through the hatch, crouching low on the sleek surface of the roof as the wind sliced around him. Iron Man was flying alongside the jet, a supervillain escort none of them had asked for. Steve shifted on the balls of his feet. He gauged distance, speed, angle, force—then threw his shield.

It made dead-center impact, knocking Iron Man off course and sending him spinning out into the wild blue yonder. The shield ricocheted back to Steve’s grip. But in only a moment Iron Man was back on course—and the quinjet was off it.

The portside wing dipped, and then the jet was falling. It fell like a maple seed, spinning in tighter and tighter circles as it lost altitude. Steve dropped back into the cabin. “So that’s a raincheck on the date, then?” Iron Man’s voice said through the speakers.

Maria was already buckling herself into the copilot’s seat. She met Steve’s eyes, acknowledging—then hit the button to eject herself into the sky. Natasha was still moving over the flight panel, trying to wrest back control.

“I can do it, I can kick him off—” Natasha said, as Steve picked her up by the waist and set her down behind the chairs. He handed her a parachute and she strapped it on, scowling at him.

“My tablet—” she said, looking toward the table where they’d been sitting minutes earlier. The angle of the cabin was approaching a thirty degree tilt; anything that wasn’t strapped down had heaped against the wall. Steve yanked the side door open.

“I’ll get it,” he promised, and pushed her out.

He stayed with the jet until almost the moment of impact, gathering a few items that would be inconvenient to lose. The song had finished. He almost missed it. Iron Man wasn’t saying anything, and that Steve didn’t miss—he didn’t need a supervillain narrating this descent to earth, a cruel echo of the way Peggy had stayed with him until the very end.

The ground was getting closer. Steve backed against the opposite wall, then took a running leap out the door. He somersaulted out of the impact zone as the quinjet slammed into the ground behind him in a cacophony not unlike how AC/DC had sounded to him that first listen. A fire sprouted in the grass a few feet away. Steve used his shield to smother it.

He rolled onto his back. He could see Natasha some distance away, floating gently toward earth. Maria Hill had doubtless landed a mile or two back. Empty fields stretched to the horizon in every direction, as ideal a landscape for parachuting as you could hope for. Iron Man had vanished into the clear blue sky.

“Has he done that before?”

“Used hair metal to announce his presence?” Natasha said. They were debriefing in the helicarrier on what was supposed to be Steve’s day off, though the army had long ago taught him never to count on those. “Unfortunately.”

“Hacked into our systems like that. Did we know he had that kind of capability?”

“Not exactly.” Fury’s expression was grim—though not, in fairness, particularly more so than usual. “The obnoxious music’s the closest thing Iron Man’s got to a consistent M.O. He came onto the scene four years ago, but he doesn’t pop up all that often, especially not on US soil.”

“Our most recent sighting of him before yesterday was three weeks ago in Switzerland,” Natasha said. “He kidnapped a leading climate change scientist from his hotel right before an awards ceremony where the guy was supposed to take the top prize. Dr. Tano hasn’t been seen since.”

Steve swiped through Iron Man’s file on the tablet in front of him. It was pretty much as he’d remembered it when Natasha had identified their attacker and he'd tried to call to mind the rundown of active supervillain-level threats he’d gotten shortly after joining SHIELD. There were a couple of fights—one in LA and one in Monaco, both of which SHIELD had termed likely intra-villain conflict, both of which had ended in Iron Man victories. There were sketchy accounts of numerous bombings in the Middle East, though those had dropped off in the last year or two. And there were scattered break-ins, robberies, kidnappings, explosions—none of which painted a clear picture of a larger goal.

“The ease with which he was able to hijack the quinjet is troubling,” Fury said. He sighed. “We should call in Stark.”

Steve coughed, ducking his head to hide that his face was heating. He’d met Tony Stark once, also shortly after joining SHIELD. He hadn’t realized the guy _was_ Tony Stark at the time. He’d been too busy (defrosting, waking up, freaking out, brooding, guinea pig-ing, adjusting) to get all caught up on celebrities and the news. Embarrassingly, he hadn’t even noticed the resemblance to Howard until hindsight kicked in.

He'd just managed to convince the agent assigned to be his minder that he could handle a real modern smartphone. “I appreciate the gesture,” he said, holding up the Jitterbug Easy-to-Use Flip Phone for Seniors they’d given him, with its gigantic numbers that took up the entire screen whenever he dialed or received a call. “But for a 94-year-old I’ve got pretty good vision. Perfect vision, actually.”

Despite what the recent Saturday Night Live skit “Captain America Meets Technology” (10 million Youtube views and climbing) would have people believe, Steve had learned the ropes of his new smartphone pretty quickly. He’d only hit a snag when trying, at Hawkeye’s intense insistence, to download Angry Birds.

“It keeps trying to make me log in,” he explained to the handsome dark-haired man he’d heard one of the agents refer to as “Tony the IT guy.” “But I _am_ logged in, see?”

Despite looking at him with a somewhat bemused expression—this was what happened, Steve figured, when all the exhaustion of adjusting to the status quo depleted his mental energy levels for things like introducing himself in a polite and friendly manner; of _course_ a random SHIELD employee he’d never met would look sideways at Captain America approaching him to demand Angry Birds, but sometimes it was all Steve could do just to get through the day, he’d try to do better next time—Tony fixed the problem easily. He handed Steve’s phone back loaded up with Angry Birds, Temple Run, and a special-access beta of a game called Candy Crush he swore was going to be huge. “I put my number in there, too. Call if you need anything. Not just tech stuff.”

“Thanks,” Steve said, grateful to Tony for being one of the few people not to treat him like a) a child, b) an extremely senior citizen, c) an Amazonian tribesman quaintly ignorant of the ways of Western civilization, d) a complete idiot, or e) all of the above, since he’d awoken from the ice. Tony’s grip was warm and firm when Steve shook his hand; his eyes glinted with the slightest sparkle of something like mischief. It set off a distant bell in Steve’s head. Only once he was back in his apartment, scrolling through his pathetically paltry list of contacts, did he see the name _Tony Stark ;)_ and realize what an idiot he was.

“Do you really think that’s a good idea, sir?” Natasha asked.

“We already have him working with Communications on security. I wanted to keep his involvement limited, but this thing with the quinjet is a serious vulnerability. If there’s one person capable of keeping Iron Man off our ass, it’s Tony Stark. Hell, I wouldn’t hate having some of that arc reactor technology he’s been developing either.” Fury frowned, attention refocusing on the holograph projection showing yesterday’s flight path—a smooth arc from New York to San Francisco, and a return journey that barely made it two hundred miles before turning sharply off-course, then ending abruptly. “Were you able to get an idea of _why_ Iron Man hijacked the jet?”

Natasha glanced sideways at Steve. He shrugged. “He rerouted us north before downing the plane five minutes later, after I put up the beginnings of a fight. Said we were headed for Seattle.”

“Specifically the Space Needle.” Natasha’s lips quirked, like the smirk was threatening a comeback. (Steve was lucky she hadn’t heard him in the shower this morning; _Highway to Hell_ had gotten stuck in his head something awful.) “He asked Cap on a date. What was his stated objective, again? Him eating lobster off your fork, or vice versa?”

Fury’s undamaged eyebrow raised. Steve rolled his eyes. “He also claimed to want world peace and a pony. He was just trying to throw us off. We know he’s not big on consistency. I doubt propositioning me is going to become a pattern.”

Not only did it become a pattern, propositioning Steve seemed to actually _replace_ Iron Man’s other established pattern of blasting AC/DC. When Steve rappelled into the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center, a Biosafety Level 4 laboratory in Maryland, the music piping through the building was startlingly familiar. It reminded him of being ten years old and standing on the sidewalk outside one of Brooklyn’s dancehalls—the Rosemont, maybe, or the Arcadia, even Grand Prospect—and Bucky daring him to see if he could sneak in and get a sip of beer without anyone noticing.

_You could have a great career, and you should. Only one thing stops you, dear—you’re too good!_

Iron Man was easy to find: all Steve had to do was follow the voice singing enthusiastically along with the recording. “ _If you want a future, darling, why don’t you get a past? ‘Cause that fatal moment’s coming at last_ …” Glass shattered. “Whoopsie-daisy. Jarvis, that didn’t have anything toxic in it, did it?”

Steve paused just outside the room, listening. Iron Man’s accomplice must have spoken in his ear, because a moment later he picked up the tune again, perfectly cheery: “ _We’re all alone, no chaperone can get our number. The world’s in slumber, let’s misbehave!_ ”

“I don’t think this is the kind of misbehavior Cole Porter had in mind,” Steve said, stepping inside.

“Captain!” Though Iron Man’s face—such as it was—remained impassive as ever, his tone-modulated voice managed to convey what sounded like genuine delight. “Perfect timing. Listen to this next verse— _there’s something wild about you, child, that’s so contagious_ —get it? Contagious? _Let’s be outrageous, let’s misbehave_!”

Steve held out his hand. “Give me the vial.”

“What vial? Oh, you mean this vial? Sorry, too risky. Even you’re not vaccinated against Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever. They didn’t officially identify the thing until ‘44, and every vaccine anybody’s come up with since has had this unfortunate side effect of being fatally toxic.”

“Then we agree,” Steve said, moving slowly closer, hand still extended, “that that vial shouldn’t leave this lab.”

“Did I say that? I don’t remember saying that. Don’t put words in my mouth, Cap. If you’d like to put in something else, though…” Steve had a feeling that if Iron Man had eyebrows and could waggle them, he’d be doing it now.

“You said it was too risky.”

“To let _you_ have it. You can’t go having hemorrhagic fever before I’ve had the chance to show you a good time. Like the song says—wait, the verse is coming—just one sec— _I feel quite sure un peu d’amour would be attractive while we’re still active. Let’s misbehave!_ God, this song is apt as hell.”

“So you’re fine with allowing millions of others to develop hemorrhagic fever?”

“That depends. Does anybody among these millions have as exquisitely-shaped a backside as yours?”

“Iron Man.” Steve couldn’t keep frustration from seeping into his voice. For every step he’d advanced, Iron Man took one back. They were circling the room in a ridiculous, dangerous gavotte. “You just said yourself I’m not vaccinated against it. I”— _and my exquisitely-shaped backside_ , he almost said but didn’t—“could get it too.”

“Well, sure, but you’ve got that red-white-and-blue immune system, you’d pull through in the end. And it’d give me a chance to nurse you back to health. Classic Florence Nightingale fantasy. I could totally pull off a little lace cap, don’t you think?”

“So that’s your endgame, then? You want to be responsible for a worldwide pandemic? You want those millions of deaths on your conscience?”

“I never said _that_ , either.” Iron Man sighed. “Look, this is much less fun when you’re looking at me like you think I might be about to haul off on a mass-murder spree. I’m taking the vial”—a tiny panel slid open in his chest, right over where a heart would be, and accepted the vial with a soft pneumatic _thwip_ before closing back up—“but I’m not gonna release it. You have it on my honor as a Boy Scout.”

“You were a Boy Scout?” Steve said skeptically.

“Well, not technically. There was this whole thing involving a burned-down gym— _totally_ not my fault, but the Scoutmaster’s gotta find someone to blame, and guess which kid he chooses? The one with the shiny metal skin and glowing eyes. That’s prejudice for you. Now.”

He held out his hand exactly as Steve had earlier. _They say that bears have love affairs, and even camels_ , the song crooned. _We’re merely mammals—let’s misbehave!_ “May I have this dance?”

Steve launched himself at Iron Man full-force. Momentum sent them both crashing back into a glass cabinet. At least there was nothing in this room to worry about accidentally releasing; three antechambers separated them from the containment unit from which Iron Man had stolen the vial. Steve hauled back his arm and landed a solid punch to Iron Man’s head. He got in a couple more hits before Iron Man’s repulsors sent him flying across the room.

“This is too fast to be a slow dance,” Iron Man complained, aiming a plasma bolt at Steve’s chest. Steve somersaulted behind a counter to avoid it, grabbing his shield from a pile of broken glass as he came back up. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m down for a little bump n’ grind, but that’s not really the vibe of this song.”

 _It's getting late and while I wait my poor heart aches on_. Steve flung his shield at Iron Man, then delivered a full-body kick to his chest while he was still off balance. _Why keep the brakes on?_ Iron Man slammed him into a counter. _Let’s misbehave!_

“Who sings this version, anyway?” Steve asked, rolling away from a punch. Iron Man’s fist splintered the countertop.

“The Arctic Monkeys.”

_You know my heart is true—_

Steve raised his shield just in time to block another plasma blast. “Never heard of them.”

— _and you say you for me care_.

“What the hell kind of 21st-century acclimation program is SHIELD running?”

Steve leapt onto a counter and launched himself into the ceiling, grabbing onto an enormous metal pipe. He brought it crashing down on Iron Man’s head.

“I’m still working my way through the Beatles.”

_Somebody’s sure to tell, but what the hell do we care?_

“All right, that’s fair.” For a split second Steve thought that Iron Man was aiming ridiculously wide. But the missiles hit their actual intended target, blowing out the north wall in a burst of fire and rubble.

_If you would just be sweet and only meet your fate, dear…_

“I’d blow you a kiss, but this isn’t an appropriate place to play around with airborne phenomena.” Iron Man dodged Steve’s attempt to grab him, soaring out of the hole he’d created. He sang along to the last line of the song as he flew into the night: “ _’Twould be a great event to take you on a date, dear!_ ”

Steve’s smartphone had been loaded with swing and jazz and big band music when his minder handed it to him. One of SHIELD’s attempts at preserving some element the 1940s simulacrum he’d woken up in, he figured, borne out of the fear they seemed to harbor that one drop of modernity too much would send him straight off the deep end. He was grateful for it anyway. The previous night’s encounter had triggered a nostalgia for his childhood that was more comfortable than the sharp-toothed ache for 1945 that had been living in his chest for so many months. He put the music on shuffle as he set off on his morning run, letting the familiar strains and the steady centering calm of exercise sweep him into a kind of mindlessness.

He was eight miles in when an unfamiliar song came on, jarringly different in tone and texture. Steve looked at his phone. It was playing _R U Mine?_ by the Arctic Monkeys.

He still had half his run to go. He let the song keep playing. After a few more Crosby and Sinatra tunes, he cued it up again. He liked the sound of it, despite himself. He paid a little more attention to the lyrics the third time through, and snorted at the line _unfair we’re not somewhere misbehaving for days._

Steve turned his phone in when he got back to SHIELD, asking the IT department to strip-search it for viruses or malware or anything else that could’ve been covertly airdropped into its pathways of copper and fiberglass. He didn’t tell them why. The agent that returned the phone to him a week later swore up and down that it was clean as a whistle.

“Huh,” Steve said. _R U Mine?_ the screen asked. He put an earbud in and pressed play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> are people still reading new multichapter Steve/Tony fics in 2020? comment below to find out


	2. well i saw fireworks from the freeway

Iron Man’s next attack on Steve’s virtue—as Natasha had taken to calling the terrorist actions of a known supervillain—followed swiftly on the heels of the last.

“Dude, come on,” Sam had said, vaulting over the back of the couch and handing Steve a beer. “You gotta get us tickets.”

“I don’t know. A basketball game? Basketball wasn’t much of a thing in my day.”

“Nuh-uh, you do not get to use that ‘back in my day’ crap on this.” Sam wagged his beer admonishingly. “I know for a fact basketball’s been around since at least the 1890s.”

“But it wasn’t so much of a _thing_. It was mostly a game for college kids. Like football.”

“Okay, now I know you’re messing with me. Look, the Dodgers left, all right?” Steve groaned, slumping back in the couch; Sam kept going, grinning. “As a Licensed Professional Counselor specializing in cases of PTSD, I get it. You’re hurt. You’ve experienced a loss. It’s normal, and it’s okay not to feel okay just yet.”

Steve leveled him a sideways look. “Is this supposed to be funny?”

“But this Nets game? This is a _good thing_. This is professional sports returning to Brooklyn for the first time since the Dodgers left, and it’s happening this Monday. This is the first step in the healing process.”

Going to catch a game in Brooklyn. Steve had to admit it sounded nice, familiar, even if so much about it had changed, including the very sport. It would still be seeing a game with a friend.

Maybe they’d have Cracker Jacks.

“Plus, they’re playing the Wizards. Old team versus new, Captain America’s birthplace versus America’s capital. Tell me that isn’t a courtside seats occasion.”

“Courtside seats, huh? How do you propose we get those?”

Sam gave him a look. “You’re Captain America.”

Steve pulled a face. “Do you want to be Captain America?”

“Yes,” Sam said instantly. Steve laughed. “But that’s not what we’re talking about right now.”

“I don’t just want to call up and demand tickets—”

“Who said anything about demanding? What you do is you call them up and say you’re Captain America and you heard about the Nets game, you’d love to show up and support the old hometown, do they know whether seats are still on sale… Guarantee they won’t let you get beyond ‘I’m Captain America’ before they’re begging you to be there. Hell, they might even offer you a contract.”

Steve raised his eyebrows. “How do you know so much about how these things work, exactly?”

Sam shrugged. “Call it instinct.” He grinned over his beer. “I think I was meant to be a celebrity.”

“Uh oh,” Sam said. “Kiss cam.”

“What’s kiss…” The words died on Steve’s tongue as it became extremely clear what kiss cam was. They were in the second timeout of the third quarter. Shots of Steve had featured on the jumbotron during every timeout so far—Steve talking to Sam, Steve signing an autograph for the daughter of one of the players, Steve eating a Twizzler. (They didn’t have Cracker Jacks.)

“Guess you’d better pucker up,” Steve said. Sam made a sound that was half-laugh, half-groan.

Something prickled the edges of Steve’s consciousness. A buzzing noise—high-pitched, sibilant, scratching at his eardrums like a mosquito. He tried to ask if Sam could hear it too, but he couldn’t move his mouth. He couldn’t move at all.

The stadium was quiet. More than 14,000 people not making a noise. The sound of a basketball dribbling on the floor and rolling to a stop, unimpeded, echoed with the percussive force of a cannon against the eerie silence.

The buzzing stopped. “Ladies and gentlemen!” A red-and-gold blur streaked across the court. Steve could still move his eyes: he tracked Iron Man as he circled the arena, flying loose and easy, like he was taking a lazy swim at the beach. “May I have your attention please? That means you, man drinking Everclear out of a Mountain Dew bottle. I don’t know what part of that should worry your friends more. And you, lady in the Carmelo Anthony jersey—so close, but it’s the Ne _t_ s, with a t, not the Knic _k_ s, with a k-sound—hear the difference? _Nets_ , t-, tuh. _Knicks_ , k-, kuh. You’ll get there. And you two—were you even on the kiss cam? Or did you just start sucking face of your own volition? You know what, good for you, keep doing your thing.”

Steve had to _move_. He had to wrest back control of his muscles. He focused on trying to move just one thing. His little finger.

“Everyone else, please direct your attention to the screens. Dude staring at his own crotch, you get a pass. I think everyone here could use some _culture_. Not to imply this isn’t an arena full of season ticket holders to the Met—that’s the _Met_ , singular, Ms. Anthony, not the Met _s_. Let’s start with a little art appreciation, shall we? Take a look at this mid-20th century piece.” Steve’s own face appeared on the jumbotron. It was like looking at a photograph of himself, but with the extra-alienating knowledge that this was happening _now_.

“Look at that perfect jawline. The flawless skin. Those luscious lips. The pensive brow framing those sparkling baby blues. Take notes, kids: in art history circles, that’s what’s known as a Greek nose. They should start calling it a _Captain_ _American_ nose, am I right?

“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Of course he’s good-looking! He was created in a lab to be the literal embodiment of physical perfection, that’s the _point_.’ Well, put this history cherry on top of your visual arts sundae: that bone structure? That ain’t Maybelline. He was born with it. Go look up ‘Steve Rogers pre-serum’ if you don’t believe me.

“Keep in mind, this guy just emerged from a seventy-year coma. Remember Ötzi, the last prehistoric guy we defrosted? He didn’t come out looking like _this_. I mean, the guy is _paralyzed_ right now, and he still looks good. Meanwhile, look at Kris Humphries. Dude looks like a baked potato that got stepped on.

“Oh, you don’t see this too often at the Met—not that Met, the _other_ one, I know, it’s confusing—color-changing artwork! I bet no one’s ever made the Mona Lisa blush. It’s just too bad about the hat, I know we’d all love to see those amber waves of grain—

“Did he just twitch? I thought I just saw a muscle move in his jaw. But I must have—there! We all saw that, right? _Damn_. This Super Soldier thing is no joke, kids. The last record for breaking paralysis was twelve minutes, and that guy just ripped a fart, so I think it’s debatable whether it really counts. It’s been, what, six minutes? Can you imagine this guy’s refractory period?”

Steve closed his eyes. He pictured the arena—the jumbotron, right in front of him; Iron Man, who he’d seen at the very corner of his vision settling down to sit on the backboard; the camera filming him, which must about eight feet away, forty-five degrees to the right. 

“We might have to cut this lesson short. He looks about thirty seconds from being able to make a fist.”

Steve opened his eyes directly into the camera.

“Make that fifteen. Gotta go. Go Globetrotters!” And once again, Iron Man sped off into the night.

“He had me.”

“Right where he wanted you.” Sam smirked. “Well, maybe not _exactly_. Sounded like he wanted you framed in a gallery, or maybe bent over a—”

“The _point_ is,” Steve ground out, “he had me at his mercy. Hell, he had 14,000 people at his mercy. And what did he actually _do_?”

“He started a meme, for one thing,” Clint pointed out.

“And he got #supersoldiersexy trending on Twitter,” Natasha said. “Again.”

“But he didn’t _hurt anyone_.” Steve spread his hands on the conference table. “Why incapacitate thousands of people and not do anything?” He sighed. “Do we know how he did it?”

“It’s Stark tech,” Coulson said. “Iron Man raided a high-security workshop about a year ago, must have picked it up then. But he’s clearly made modifications. The Sonic Taser was rejected by the military for being a non-lethal weapon that couldn’t actually guarantee non-lethality. Even short-term exposure put dangerous strain on test subjects’ circulatory systems—strain that could be visibly observed.” He pulled up images of men and women with sweaty, pale skin, their veins purple and protruding. If Steve had looked like that while paralyzed, #supersoldiersexy would definitely not be Twitter trending. “Nothing from the footage of the other night, nor the multiple tests we’ve run on Captain Rogers and Staff Sergeant Wilson since, suggests that they’ve suffered any ill side effects.”

“We’re looking into the possibility that this attack was intended as racialist propaganda,” Agent Hill said.

“ _What_?” Sam said.

Maria shrugged. “Iron Man’s speech focused heavily on Captain Rogers’ physical attributes as embodying the ideal of human appearance. There’s an established history of white supremacists appropriating the Captain America imagery and mythos to their own ends. So far, though, we haven’t found anything linking Iron Man to similar ideologies.”

“Could this attack have been a distraction? Did anything else go down at the same time that we might be able to trace back to Iron Man?”

“We’re following those leads as well,” said Fury.

“He could’ve just been showboating,” Natasha said. “Maybe he just wanted to let us know he has the weapon.”

Sam nodded. “A threat.”

“It’s a classic tactic of terrorism. Hell, it’s right there in the name: instilling terror. Incapacitate Captain America on live TV and, by extension, show the world an impotent American government.”

“Stealing the virus did a pretty good job of sowing fear, too.”

“But it still has to be _for_ something,” Steve said. “Terrorists don’t scare people just for the sake of making them afraid. A threat has two parts: the demand and the ‘or else.’ We have the ‘or else.’ Where’s the demand?”

“We’re keeping an eye out.” As though anticipating Steve’s next question, Fury added, “No outbreaks of Crimean–Congo hemorrhagic fever have been reported yet. There was one case last week, but that man seems to have picked it up in the actual Congo.” His lips set into a grim smile. “The WHO has made finding a vaccine their top priority, though. A research team in Turkey finally got funding for a clinical trial. Iron Man may be doing more good than he knows.”

“What kind of arsenal are we talking?” Steve asked. He was piloting the quinjet over miles and miles of empty army land. They’d gotten the call that Iron Man had been sighted only half an hour ago; there hadn’t been time for much of a mission briefing.

“Mostly SI weapons,” Clint said, screwing tips onto his arrows.

“Entirely, I think,” Natasha said.

Steve raised his eyebrows. “Does Tony Stark know about this?”

“I have no idea.”

“They were purchased before SI stopped producing weapons,” Clint said. “The way they used to buy Stark’s rockets, the US could get through a couple wars before they start running out.”

“To Justin Hammer’s chagrin,” Natasha muttered.

Steve frowned. He understood, practically speaking, that you didn’t toss out millions of dollars’ worth of munitions just because their manufacturer decided it wanted out of the death-dealing business. But knowing the government had so many stockpiled reserves, possibly without the knowledge of the man responsible for producing them, didn’t sit quite right with him. He’d seen a clip of the press conference where Tony announced he was shutting down the weapons manufacturing division. Some people had latched onto what he’d said about seeing his weapons fall into the wrong hands, snuffing out American lives. But it was clear, from that press conference and additional quotes he’d given later, that Tony hadn’t just wanted to keep his weapons out of the hands of terrorists. He’d wanted to keep them out of anyone’s hands.

Steve wondered whether Tony had offered to buy back the weapons he’d already sold to the US. He didn’t think there was a chance in hell the government would ever take such an offer, but if it had been Steve—Steve with the weapons-mongering empire, Steve with the billion-dollar fortune, Steve who’d seen the thing he built be used for evil—he would have had to try.

He didn’t know what he would have done when they said no.

“There he is,” Natasha said at his shoulder.

“And there’s the arsenal.” Clint strapped on his quiver. “Showtime.”

The arsenal was a low-slung building built atop mottled, patchy scrubland. Steve flew low over the roof, then banked back around, lowering the quinjet to the ground a hundred feet off. Every weapon the jet had was trained on the figure standing between it and the arsenal. Steve switched his headset to speaker mode.

“Iron Man, you are in violation of US Army Regulations 190-11, 190-17, 190-54, 190-59, and 380-40 regarding the unauthorized entry of persons or vehicles onto army property. In accordance with the provisions of the directive issued by the Secretary of Defense, pursuant to the provisions of Section 21, Internal Security Act of 1950, and per AR 190-30, you are herein liable to be searched, and any items about your person may be seized and confiscated. Per AR 190-14, I am authorized to use deadly force in removing any person or persons whose presence threatens the orderly administration of this National Defense Area. Please be advised that I will not hesitate to use that authority. Surrender with your hands—uh, down.”

“I love it when you talk army to me, Cap. Could you repeat all that while we watch the fireworks?” Iron Man spread his arms wide.

Nothing happened.

“Uh,” Iron Man said, turning back to look at the arsenal. “Huh. Let’s try that again. Fireworks!”

Steve waited patiently.

“…Well. Okay. That’s weird.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Steve said. “I’ve heard it happens to lots of guys.”

Iron Man spun back around. “Was that a dick joke?” he demanded. “From _Captain America_? I salute you, Captain. My dick also salutes you. But it tends to stand at attention whenever it senses your presence, so I wouldn’t read too much into that.” He started to rise off the ground. “Guess we’ll just have to make our _own_ fireworks.”

An arrow struck square in the middle of his red plated chest. Iron Man looked down. Then he exploded.

“Oooh, ahhh,” Clint said in Steve’s ear.

Steve’s grip tightened on the controls, mirroring the sudden tightness in his chest. The arrowhead’s detonation sent several smaller explosive loads skittering across Iron Man’s metal surface like magnetic pebbles; each in their turn exploded and sent off a third, even smaller round of pebble-bombs to find the least-damaged parts of their target and detonate. By the time the entire payload was spent, Iron Man’s figure was completely obscured, enshrouded in too much fire and smoke for Steve to make out any piece of him.

“Captain, we’ve got choppers incoming,” Natasha said in his ear.

Steve swore. “Didn’t Fury tell them we’d take care of it?”

Clint snorted. “And you expected them to listen? The army must have been a lot different in your day, Cap.”

Steve pulled the quinjet off the ground. “Widow, are you back on the roof?”

“Right where you left me.”

Steve didn’t ask whether she’d succeeded in activating the arsenal’s emergency foam retardant system. He figured the lack of Iron Man’s promised fireworks told him well enough.

“We’re coming to pick you up. Then we’ll deal with the army.”

“Nice stalling back there, Cap,” Clint said as Steve maneuvered the quinjet over the roof. “Was that legit army gobbledygook, or did you make it up?”

“About half and half.” Steve looked back toward the horizon as Natasha climbed back on board. All that was left of Iron Man was a trail of smoke stretching toward the horizon.

“Is this the cool kids’ table?”

Steve looked up. Tony Stark was standing across from him, wearing dark-tinted sunglasses and carrying a Chipotle bag. Steve smiled.

“It wasn’t when I was growing up.”

“Really?” Tony said, sitting down. “But I heard you had perfect bone structure.”

Steve put his face in his hands and groaned.

“I’ve had my fair share of obsessive fans—I mean, look at me. A face this handsome attached to a person this famous? Forget it—but none of them has ever held an entire NBA game hostage for me. I’m almost jealous.”

Steve ran his hands over his face. “Just lucky, I guess.”

Tony tossed his sunglasses onto the table and dug into his lunch. He looked tired, dark circles inscribed under his eyes. Steve wondered whether it was whatever Fury had him working on that was making him look so wrung-out, or if he was just victim of the same workhorse tendencies that had consumed Howard.

“Had any encounters with Iron Man since?” Tony asked through a mouthful of burrito.

Steve nodded. “One.”

“Did you get him?”

The words resonated in Steve’s mind. _Get him_ —so simply put. Decisive yet euphemistic. How many times had he heard it? A redheaded boy telling him to chase down an assassin. Peggy sending him off to face the Red Skull. Thousands of propaganda posters showing square-jawed American soldiers staring down grotesque swastikaed monsters, emblazoned with the banner _LET’S GO GET ‘EM!_ It had all seemed so simple, then. Defeat HYDRA. Stop the Nazi menace. Knock them down one by one, one thing at a time—one mission, one fight, one hit. That was how you got ‘em.

What did getting Iron Man look like? It wasn’t as simple as wanting him dead. SHIELD had him classified as a terrorist and a supervillain. Steve couldn’t deny the former, but it seemed to him that if Iron Man was trying to take over the world he was doing a pretty bad job at it. Iron Man was a question mark, an enigma in metallic plating. What Steve wanted to get were _answers_.

“Can’t say for sure,” he said. “We definitely dealt him a significant amount of damage—Hawkeye did, anyway. But in this line of work, you don’t call it until you’ve seen the body.”

“Guess I’ve got a good argument for that policy sitting right across from me.” Steve huffed an acknowledging laugh. “It’s funny,” Tony went on. “When my dad would go on all those long missions to the Arctic, I always thought he was looking for a corpse. Something to bury. Now I wonder whether he might have suspected that you could still be alive out there.”

Steve shrugged. “ _I_ never suspected. I mean—when I crashed that plane, I never imagined it was something I might survive. Your dad knew more about the serum than I did, though.”

“Not enough.” Tony’s expression was wry. “He spent a lot of hours in the lab trying to reverse-engineer it from your blood. It was his pet project. Well, that and finding your plane. And working on the arc reactor. Dad had a lot of pet projects, come to think of it. Hell, you could include me in that list—something to putter around with on the weekends, vowing you’ll really give it the attention it needs if you ever get around to retiring.”

Steve was only half-listening, his attention arrested by Tony’s mention of the arc reactor. He knew the basics: how Tony had been kidnapped in Afghanistan, how he’d emerged from the sand three months later with a self-sustaining energy source embedded in his chest. Fury had said something about the reactor’s potential output dwarfing the power generated by nuclear fusion. And then there was the new element Tony had synthesized, drawing on his father’s theories, which were in turn drawn from study of the Tesseract. Steve remembered the way Schmidt had coveted the thing, _fondled_ it, almost, even as it started to burn his hand and melt what remained of his face, even as it had opened a portal to the universe and sent him screaming through it. Steve remembered the _juice_ radiating off the Tesseract, how he could feel and fear its power even from a distance.

All of that—abduction and bio-modification, nuclear-level power and scientific breakthroughs, clean energy and an echo of the thing responsible for plunging Steve into the ice—it was all right there, in Tony Stark’s chest.

Steve realized he was staring and felt his face heat. “Sorry.”

Tony waved him off easily. “If I didn’t want people to stare, I wouldn’t wear such alluring ties. Do you want to see it?”

“I—sure,” Steve said.

The arc reactor seeped a steady light through Tony’s thin undershirt. Steve was aware of the rumor floating around claiming Tony Stark no longer had a heart, that he’d replaced it with this machine. It had been thoroughly debunked, of course, denied by Tony himself and proved impossible by numerous experts, but still the rumor persisted. There was an obvious fear lurking beneath it: that in modifying himself with this revolutionary new technology, Tony Stark had made himself less human.

The arc reactor was the same color as the Tesseract. The power it could generate was astronomical, unfathomable. But Steve couldn’t find anything to fear in the thing keeping Tony Stark alive.

Steve looked up. Tony’s eyes flitted quickly away, and he had the feeling Tony had been studying him as closely as he’d been studying the reactor. When Tony looked back, his expression was deliberately casual. Steve nodded at his chest, the way he was holding his shirt open around the reactor. “You’re like Superman.”

Tony coughed. “Yeah, something like that,” he said, rebuttoning his shirt. “Anyway, you like that, you should see the one I’ve got powering Stark Tower. 100% self-sufficient clean energy. The next step is taking the entire Silicon Valley off the grid. We’re in talks with Stanford. It’s a whole new era of sustainability.”

“That’s great,” Steve said, meaning it. “Not just for the planet, but for you too. That you were able to get out. Of the body count business, I mean. Actually do some good in the world.” He looked down, wrapping his hands around his coffee cup.

Tony’s eyebrows raised. “You thinking about getting out, Cap?”

“You’re not the only one to ask me that recently.” He sighed, leaning back in his chair. “I don’t know. Sometimes I get the feeling that the world’s biggest problems aren’t actually things you can punch in the face.” He smiled wryly. “But you said it yourself—you had more to offer the world beyond your ability to blow stuff up. What do I have? Secondhand muscles and half an art degree.”

He made himself shut up. He was veering into self-pity, and nobody needed to hear that from Captain America.

“I think you’re selling yourself short, Cap,” Tony said. The look he gave Steve was considering. “I mean, for one thing, you’re forgetting that perfect bone structure everyone’s talking about.”

Steve ducked his head, huffing a laugh.

“For another,” Tony went on, his grin fading back into seriousness, “I don’t think it was your muscles that made Dad so sure you were the greatest man he’d ever known.”

Steve looked up, surprised. “Howard said that?”

“ _Constantly_.”

“That’s…a lot to live up to.”

“Who says you have to?” Tony wadded up his trash and stuffed it back in the fast food bag. “My dad died in 1991. And I’ve met Wade Boggs, the Red Sox third baseman who once drank seventy beers on a single cross-country flight, so the position of greatest man _I’ve_ ever known is already taken.”

Steve laughed. “That’s…almost comforting. Thanks.”

“Almost comforting, that’s my specialty. Along with nearly romantic and just about fun to be around.” Tony cleared his throat and stood. “I should get going. If I’m not home by two o’clock, my AI starts calling the neighbors.”

Steve stood up too. He held out his hand. “It was good running into you, Tony. Take care of yourself.”

“You too. I mean it—don’t let Fury crack the whip too hard. Take some time for yourself. Ride a rollercoaster, visit a strip club, bingewatch Downton Abbey. And if you want to watch more basketball, could you make it a Celts game? I’d love to see those guys struck with severe nerve paralysis.”

Steve laughed. “I’ll do my best.”

He sat back down after Tony left, picking up his coffee and looking out the helicarrier window. Clint had declared himself “80% confident” that his arrow had permanently eliminated Iron Man as a threat; when Natasha pointed out that they had lost his trail only a couple miles from the detonation point, Clint had rolled his eyes and amended that figure to 78%.

But Steve remembered something Howard Stark had told him not long after he’d gotten involved with Project Rebirth. “This is a brave new world, kid. You gotta start expecting the unexpected.”

Unexpected, like emerging from the ice after a seventy-year sleep. Unexpected, like stumbling out of the desert with shrapnel hovering millimeters from your heart. Unexpected, like Iron Man surviving to face Steve another day.


	3. really really really wanna zig-a-zig-ah

One area the Avengers were severely lacking in, to Steve’s mind, was aerial support. With Thor off-world more often than not, the team’s ability to get above an increasingly mobile enemy was limited by the quinjet’s bulk and by its members’ susceptibility to gravity. At a time like this especially, with the adversary massed in a low, roughly circular depression in the middle of the Great Basin Desert, having someone with flight capabilities would be a huge asset.

But Fury still hadn’t approved the addition of the Falcon to the roster. It might have had something to do with how Steve had just started bringing this “random guy you found in a park,” as Natasha affectionately termed Sam, along to top-secret SHIELD meetings. Fury didn’t appreciate being undermined. Steve didn’t appreciate being accused of undermining when he tried to make decisions regarding his own damn team. That left them at something of a standstill: Sam no longer had to contend with agents swarming around trying to drive him out of the building whenever he walked into SHIELD, but he hadn’t been reunited with the EXO-7 Flight Suit, either.

Which left Steve here. He’d done more with less. Hell, the last time he’d been in Nevada, a dozen USO performers had disappeared on the Las Vegas Strip right before curtain time. If he could drag a belligerent Texan in a Hitler mustache out of a labyrinthine casino without taking any civilian casualties, surely he could manage more or less the same here.

“Looks like about 150 civilians,” he said, scanning the crowd below.

“Kind of a disappointing turnout,” Natasha said, “considering how many people responded to the Facebook invite.”

“I’m seeing maybe half a dozen legit Asgardian weapons,” Clint reported. He was perched in a tree that grew out of a sparse clump of vegetation around the depression’s south side. “The other ‘guards’ look like they have a mix of scavenged Chitauri tech and maybe a couple smuggled Wakandan spears. And given that this is Nevada, it’s probably best to assume at least one gun per hippie.”

“Hey, Cap,” Natasha said, nodding at the man standing at the center of the crowd below. “That ‘one God’ of yours…does he dress like that?”

With his height—six-foot-six, according to SHIELD’s records—and long blond hair pulled into what Steve had been informed was called a “manbun,” combined with his handsomely weathered face, flowing white robe, and bare feet, the man actually looked like a Hollywood actor attempting to audition for Thor and Jesus at the same time.

Take out the Hollywood part, and that description pretty much reflected the actual situation. The man was an Asgardian whose time on Earth SHIELD had been able to trace back to at least the sixties. “But it’s only been in the last year,” Fury had said at the briefing, “thanks to the little visits we received from Thor and Loki, that he’s been able to build himself a following.

“His name is Knut, but his followers call him Odinson. Before you ask, no, he isn’t Odin’s actual son. He tried claiming that for a while, but too many people called him on it and he backed off. He’s gotten better at crafting his stories. Figuring out what is and isn’t generally known by the average Midgardian, what he can get the below-average, moved-to-Sedona-to-open-a-massage-parlor-offering-transcendental-healing-through-crystals Midgardian to swallow. It’s a lot of ‘my best buddy Thor and I love to hunt dragons’ and ‘one time I saved Queen Frigga from choking on a chicken bone.’”

“We asked Thor the last time he was here if he had any idea who Knut was,” Coulson put in. “He didn’t.”

“Knut’s most popular stories among his followers, and the ones best at gaining him _new_ followers, have been ones involving Loki.”

“Even after New York?” Steve asked.

“Especially after New York.”

“People love a bad boy,” Natasha said.

Steve opened his mouth to protest, then shut it, grimacing.

“So Knut started working in more Loki. But he over-promised. His followers came to want _more_ from their little cult than just the privilege of applauding every time ‘Odinson’ took a shit. They want to bring Loki back. Knut’s been stalling them for a while, but he doesn’t want to lose his fan club. It looks like he’s caving to the pressure.”

“How do we know all this?” Steve asked.

“They’re a very modern cult. Strong social media presence.”

“We’ve been monitoring their online activity for months,” Coulson said. “But up until now they haven’t done anything actually illegal.”

“Until now?” Clint repeated. “Is there a law against summoning Norse gods I don’t know about?”

“Given the damage he wreaked on New York, I’d say inviting Loki to winter in Nevada fits pretty squarely under ‘inciting violence,’” Fury said.

“They’ve also been hunting wild turkeys out of season,” Coulson said. To Steve’s nonplussed look, he added, “Knut claims it’s part of the summoning ritual, but based off an Instagram post he made back in April, he seems to just really hate turkeys.”

From Steve’s vantage point on the ridge, the gathering looked about how he might’ve imagined something called a “summoning ritual” would look—which was probably the point. But despite the elaborate sigil scratched into the dirt, the lit candles which might have appeared more impressive if it hadn’t been just after noon on a sunny day, and the dead turkeys strewn haphazardly about, SHIELD’s analysts claimed the science checked out: Knut’s actions could open the Bifrost and allow Loki passage.

Over the bullhorn, Coulson ordered the cult one last time to stand down. Knut took a moment away from leading his followers in prayer to flip him off.

“Okay, Avengers,” Steve said, pulling on his cowl. “That’s our cue.”

It felt good to fight.

If most of the world’s problems weren’t punchable, as Steve had admitted to Tony Stark, that only made it all the more satisfying when he encountered one that _was_. Clint and Natasha were following his orders to disarm and subdue the human cult members. The Asgardian Steve had left for himself.

Knut wasn’t armed, but he was taller than even Thor, and nearly as well-muscled. He fought with a rangy, shifty-eyed agility, almost coyotelike in his movements. If he hadn’t chosen to start a cult, he could’ve taken Sam’s advice and gone into Ultimate Fighting.

It was a relief not to have to hold back, to put the full force of his strength into every blow he dealt. There was something soothing in the ebb and flow of combat. Steve found himself taking hits that he could have dodged if he had tried a little harder. Bucky used to call him a glutton for punishment, back in his weakling days—Steve hadn’t thought it was true then, but it might be now. It wasn’t _punishment_ he wanted, exactly: more like catharsis. Taking a punch to the jaw lit up the neurons in his brain, sparking a rush of adrenaline, of certainty. It allowed Steve to stop thinking and lose himself in a conflict that was, for once, exactly as simple as it appeared. Hit and get hit. Beat or be beaten.

Knut was flagging—less out of fatigue, Steve thought, than frustration. His strikes grew sloppy and desperate. It was almost disappointingly easy for Steve to grab his next punch, twist his arm around his back, and slap on the handcuffs.

Clint and Natasha were already finished; for all their firepower, the hippies hadn’t put up much of a fight. Fury’s agents had set up a station for processing the cultists’ confiscated items. “Dude, they brought actual Kool-Aid,” Clint said as Steve approached. “Wanna taste?”

“Maybe later,” Steve said, handing the manacled Knut off to a couple of slightly cowed agents.

The summoning circle was near-deserted now, only a handful of SHIELD agents crawling over the runes to collect turkey carcasses and take samples of crumbly dirt. A jackrabbit started out of the sagebrush as Steve reached the cluster of vegetation around the basin’s south side. He passed the tree that had served as Clint’s vantage point. Leaning his shield against a rock, he settled on the ground next to Iron Man.

“You sign up to be on Loki’s welcoming committee?” he asked.

“Nah. I’m more of a classical pantheon kind of guy. Call me when you’ve got Bacchus on the horn. Or Cupid.” Iron Man smirked at him. Then Steve realized that Iron Man _couldn’t_ smirk at him, that his ‘face’ looked just the same as ever, and that he was getting far too familiarized with Iron Man’s whole schtick if he’d started reading expressions where there were none.

“I’m not really here,” Iron Man said. The way he was sprawled back on his elbows made Steve wonder whether all that metal was somehow more comfortable than it looked. There was no sign of the damage Hawkeye had inflicted: every inch of Iron Man was gleaming and perfect.

“Then who did I think I saw skulking in the trees when I was fighting Fabio down there?”

“Well, if they were _skulking_ , it definitely wasn’t me. I don’t skulk. That’s possibly the least sexy word in the English language. Maybe you thought you saw the Kool-Aid Man. Or Clifford.”

“Who?”

“Okay, why do you know Fabio but you don’t know Clifford the Big Red Dog? Who’s in charge of your education?”

“You’re not going to Trojan Horse me more music, are you?”

“The second Clifford drops an album, I definitely am. Nice job taking down Samson, by the way. That’s really why I came.”

“I thought you weren’t actually here.”

“As a supervillain, I’m not. I’m here strictly in a cheerleading capacity. It’s been a while since I’ve read the Geneva Conventions, but I’m pretty sure passing up a chance to see your ass in action is considered a war crime.”

Steve snorted. “You realize that the statute of limitations on your _actual_ crimes doesn’t expire the moment you leave my field of vision, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t? Well, shit. I have the worst fucking attorneys.” Iron Man clambered to his feet—the old-fashioned way, not making use of his repulsors—and then _stretched_. Steve stared. He couldn’t work out what game Iron Man was playing, either in general or this specific moment, but he had a feeling he was losing badly.

“Well,” Iron Man said, and Steve had to remind himself once again that he wasn’t _actually_ smirking, at least visibly, “as long as I’m here, guess I’d better make it worth your while.”

“Wait, let me guess. Now that I’ve fought a guy from Asgard, I should guard my ass?” Steve frowned. “Or— _not_ guard my ass? From you? If I wanted to summon an Asgardian, I should’ve—no, if I wanted to _stop_ an Asgardian from getting summoned—”

“Wow, you’re _bad_ at this. You’re also, I hate to say, incredibly vain. You probably think this theft is about you.”

“You just told me it was,” Steve protested, and then: “What theft?”

The SHIELD agent wrapping a long glowing staff in bubble wrap barely blinked when Iron Man came swooping out of the sky to pluck it out of her hands. “Did I hear right? Is this thing seriously called a Berserker Rod?” Iron Man twirled the staff high in the air, then swung it down to point at a boulder. A blast of energy blew it into pebbles. Steve rounded the edge of the basin just in time to use his shield to block some of the larger chunks from smashing a couple of hapless cultists. “Steve! Come get a taste of my Berserker Rod! Hear how easy that was? Sometimes the best innuendos are the most obvious. You don’t have to go digging.”

Natasha grabbed a Chitauri gun and flipped onto the roof of a SHIELD van. Iron Man flew toward her, skirting the blast she fired by a hair’s breadth and forcing her to flatten onto the van’s surface.

“Hey nutcase, think fast!” Knut looked up as a laser sliced through his manacles, then caught the Asgardian sword Iron Man tossed at him. He stared at it for a moment—failing to heed Iron Man’s explicit instruction that he think fast—but brought it up just in time to clash against Steve’s shield.

“Looks like you’re guarding your own ass today, Cap,” Iron Man said, as Knut came at Steve with wild slashes of energy-crackling sword. “But feel free to summon me if you’re looking for an Ass-drillian, okay?”

(Steve didn’t know why he Googled it, later, but he did. Ásðril was a real place, it turned out: a small hamlet just outside Asgard’s capital city. Beautiful waterfalls, peaceful grottoes, thatched-roof cottages. It sounded nice. He might have to visit sometime.)

“Justin Hammer’s throwing us a party,” Natasha announced.

“That’s nice,” Steve said vaguely, not looking up from his game of Temple Run. Tony Stark had been right: it was weirdly addicting. “Why?”

“To thank us for New York.”

“New York was nearly eight months ago,” Bruce pointed out. “Why break out the ticker tape now?”

“We can be sure it’s self-serving,” Natasha said, pulling something up on a screen. “We just don’t know how.”

Clint wandered over to peer over her shoulder. “Image rehab after that reactor meltdown last month? Product announcement? Pretense for stealing some of Steve’s blood to try to reverse-engineer the serum?”

“I’ll try not to run into any needles.”

Natasha snorted. “Look at this. Tony Stark has been added to and removed from the guest list three different times.”

“Hammer sent you the guest list?” Steve asked. Natasha gave him a sideways look that he took as a no.

Clint rubbed his chin. “If he’s announcing something, he’ll want to rub it in Stark’s face. But if there’s anyone who could pick out a glaring flaw in his product—and let’s face it, most gen-one Hammer tech features some sort of bug that makes the exhaust port on the Death Star look like a minor oversight—it’d be Tony Stark.” He shrugged. “I see the dilemma. Which way did he settle?”

“Not invited.”

Steve made an unconscious noise of disappointment. Natasha raised her eyebrows.

“I fell off a cliff,” he said, holding up his phone.

“Remember Hammer’s Ram’s Horn missiles?” Clint said. “Those things killed nearly as many of their operators with their malfunctions as they did the enemy.”

Bruce raised his hand. “Am I the only one thinking that this party sounds like a bad idea?”

“I don’t even like regular parties,” Steve said.

“It’s going to be a disaster,” Natasha said. “That’s why we’re going.”

“So why aren’t we going in yet?” Bruce asked. “Not that I’m complaining, I’m no more eager to get this party started than the next guy, but—”

“It’s important that the Avengers present a united front,” Steve said. “We should all arrive together, as a team, projecting strength and unity.”

Sam leaned back to talk across Steve. “He’s nervous,” he told Bruce. “He doesn’t think he’s good at parties.”

Bruce gave Steve a sympathetic look. “If it helps, at least you know you won’t turn into a giant monster and start smashing the decorations.”

“You haven’t seen him when he’s had a few drinks!” Sam slapped Steve’s back. “God, I wish I wasn’t kidding. Banner, you’re a chemist, right? Think you could brew something up to get this guy drunk?”

“What’s the highest APV you’ve tried?”

“Oh look, they’re here,” Steve said loudly, stepping forward to open the door of the black SUV that had just pulled up to the curb.

“Thanks,” Natasha said, accepting his hand out of the car. “Nice uniform.”

Steve tugged on the cuffs. It hadn’t seemed like it should still fit, seventy years after his measurements were taken, but of course it did. “Special delivery from the Smithsonian,” he said ruefully.

“Don’t take it too hard. We’re all getting old. The other day they played the Spice Girls on the oldies station.”

“The Spice Girls—they’re one of those girl groups from the sixties, right?”

A wolf whistle distracted him from her answer. A gaggle of college-aged girls waved at him, pink-faced and giggling. Steve waved back, nonplussed. He didn’t know _why_ he felt nonplussed until he realized he’d subconsciously expected Iron Man to be the catcaller.

“Hey, you’re my date tonight,” Natasha said, grabbing his arm as they joined the throng of people oozing indoors.

“I thought I was Steve’s date,” Sam complained.

Thor slung a heavy arm around Sam’s shoulder. “You can be my date!”

“I—yeah, okay.”

“Having a date gives me excuses,” Natasha explained to Steve in a low tone. “‘Oh no, we can’t kiss here, my date might see. Let’s go into this private room filled with highly sensitive information.’ ‘Oh no, I can’t keep listening to you talk about the PH levels in soil, I have to find my date.’”

“That does sound handy,” Steve said, thinking of the SHIELD nurse who’d spent forty-five minutes telling him about her collection of Captain America lunchboxes. Unfortunately, he didn’t think she would buy him bringing a date to his next prostate exam.

“There’s Senator Stern. How do I look?”

Natasha’s slinky black dress appeared to leave little to the imagination, but Steve knew she had an entire arsenal hidden beneath it. “Like a fever,” he said.

“Try to make friends.” She left a lingering kiss on his cheek for the benefit of onlookers, then deftly sidestepped Justin Hammer, who had chosen that moment to approach with arms spread, exclaiming “Natalie!”

“She probably didn’t hear me,” Hammer said, watching Natasha disappear into the crowd. “No big, we’ll catch up later. Captain America! Good to see you, buddy. Hey, you like the decorations? My party planner—what’s her name? Veronica?”

“Roberta,” said his harried-looking assistant.

“Whatever, she was a hack. She just wanted to do Thor’s hammer, and I said, what, are you crazy? What about the rest of the Avengers? What about Captain America’s shield?”

“It was a visual pun,” the assistant said, looking near tears. “It’s a _hammer_.”

“It’s, uh, nice,” Steve said. Aluminum replicas of his shield hung at regular intervals on the walls, while Mjolnir topped every table like a centerpiece. Despite Hammer’s claimed concern that all Avengers be represented in the décor, that seemed to be as far as the theme extended.

Thor spent fifteen minutes at their assigned table pointing out all the ways in which the replica hammer failed to be even a passable facsimile—“these runes are just embarrassing, any Asgardian child who wrote like this would be remanded for extra schooling”—then grabbed the wrong one when he got up in search of more crème puffs. The mistake only came to light when a man attempting to borrow a chair from their table found himself unable to budge it. “Sorry,” Steve said automatically, moving the hammer off the seat. “There you go.”

“This party sucks,” Sam announced, stealing Steve’s champagne and downing it in one gulp. “They ran out of booze, my date is ignoring me for crème puffs, and what the hell is this playlist? ‘The Worst of Linkin Park’? ‘Smash Mouth Deep Cuts’? _Nickelback_? Steve, do you have a _not_ to-do list? Write down everything I just said.”

“They ran out of booze?” Clint looked alarmed.

“Hammer claims more is coming, but…um.”

Steve twisted in his chair, following Sam’s gaze. “Yeah! That’s what I’m talking about!” Justin Hammer danced onto the stage, the music cutting off abruptly mid-song and another taking its place. The couples who had been dancing faltered like figures on a poorly-wound music box. Hammer’s assistant’s halfhearted attempt to herd them off the dance floor only added to the confusion.

“Thanks for coming,” Hammer said, taking the podium. “Ladies and gentlemen, for far too long, this country has had to place its brave men and women in harm’s way. But then the Avengers arrived. When the world needed them, they were there.” He led the room in a round of applause. Steve tried to tamp down the foreboding that had blossomed in his chest. “But they can’t be everywhere, can they? As impressive as they are, they are only five men—sorry, four men, one Hulk.” He paused.

“…I think he wants us to _laugh_ ,” Sam said, somewhere between awed and horrified.

Hammer cleared his throat and continued: “We can’t let the Avengers face these scary new threats on their own. We need to step up. We need to do _our_ part. Ladies and gentlemen, today I present to you the new face of the United States military: the Hammer Drone. Army! Navy! Air Force! Marines!”

“No love for the Coast Guard, huh?” Clint muttered, kicking his feet up on the table.

“I remember when I was the new face of the United States military,” Steve said.

Sam eyed the drones critically. “Yours is prettier.”

“Aren’t they wonderful? Take a look at this.” Hammer affected an exaggerated expression. “I’m thirsty. Yes, I do believe I could use a drink. Oh garçon!” He winked at the crowd. “Could you bring me a glass of champagne, please?”

One of the Army drones marched over, its tray of champagne flutes perfectly balanced so the liquid didn’t move at all. Hammer reached for a glass, then pulled back. “You know what? I’m a busy guy, I don’t have the time. Hand it to me. Take a look at this fine motor control,” he added to the audience, as the drone lifted its arm, took aim, and fired a rocket into the podium.

The podium exploded in a burst of fire and glass. “What? No,” Hammer said, as the ballroom filled with screams. “I said _champagne_. Jennie, what’s happening? Why is it doing this?”

The Hammer Drones had all switched into battle mode. Champagne glasses shattered on the stage as catering trays were dropped in favor of arming wrist-mounted grenade launchers. Steve was already on his feet. “We need to evacuate,” he said as people started diving under tables. A drone sprayed the wall behind him with bullets, turning several replica shields into swiss cheese.

Natasha somehow materialized out of thin air and read his mind at the same time. “Your shield’s under the table.”

Even had there been time to question her, Steve was used enough to her hyper-preparedness by now not to bother. Not only was his shield affixed to the underside of the table, but—“Falcon, you’re up,” he said, tossing the EXO-7 Flight Suit at Sam.

“Are you serious?” Sam looked at Natasha. “I could kiss you.”

“Hey! You’re supposed to be _my_ date.” Thor had crème in his beard, but at least he’d managed to reunite with his actual hammer.

“Let’s save all kissing until the end, huh?” Steve said. “Hawkeye, you’re on evac. Widow, you wanna get Bruce out of here? Thor—”

Thor hurled Mjolnir directly into a drone’s chest, sending it crashing back into another drone, which crashed into a third.

“Yeah. That.”

A silver-haired man who Steve suspected was singlehandedly responsible for the evening’s alcohol shortage had apparently taken Justin Hammer’s exhortation to not let the Avengers take on the world’s threats alone to heart. He grabbed a chair and smashed it against a drone. The drone turned around, as unaffected as if it had been kissed by a butterfly, and focused its camera on him.

Steve slammed into the drone’s chest with two feet, sending it flying into the wall. A nearby Marine drone pivoted, identifying him as a target; he waited a half-second for its targeting system to latch on before diving out of the way, letting the second drone take out the first. Robot parts flew in every direction. A head rolled to a stop a few feet away.

“Justin Hammer is an _idiot_ ,” it said in Iron Man’s voice.

The drunken idiot made another run at a drone, only to be picked up and hauled away by Sam. Under Clint’s direction, people were filing out in a semi-orderly, only-slightly-panicked fashion. Natasha came running in, presumably having left Bruce in a relatively calm location; Steve used his shield to launch her into the air, where she caught a ride with an Air Force drone. He ducked another rocket aimed at him by the Marine drone, then deflected a plasma beam back at the drone that had fired it.

“I mean, with code like this, the guy’s practically asking to be hacked. He’s _begging_ for it,” the head at his feet continued. “Would you believe if I told you I didn’t even do anything to make the drones act like this?”

“No,” Steve said, hurling his shield at a drone flying overhead. It crashed into the Marine drone that had been pestering him.

“I _barely_ did. Imagine tapping someone gently on the shoulder, and they stumble forward twenty feet and jump off a bridge. There was no push. There was barely a nudge.”

The head wasn’t actually _doing_ anything besides talking, so Steve focused on other priorities. An Air Force drone landed in front of him. He readied himself to fight—but then the robot plunged its hand into its own metal chest. Sparks flew and wires sizzled as it pulled something out: a silver button, cupped in the drone’s hands like a baby bird.

“Look,” Iron Man said from the head on the ground. “They’re equipped with _self-destruct_ _mechanisms_. Hammer must’ve really pissed off one of his engineers.”

The drone in front of Steve swayed on its feet, the hole in its chest flickering feebly. Steve grabbed the explosive out of its hands and roundhouse kicked it into a pillar.

The head was making various sounds of disgust, apparently as Iron Man—wherever he actually was—scrolled through code. “I wouldn’t trust these drones to wage a game of Kick the Can, let alone a war. Hey, when you played Kick the Can growing up, did the kid who was It go out looking for the other kids, or did they just sort of circle the can?”

“Um,” Steve said, jamming his shield into the seam of a drone’s “neck” and popping its head off like a bottlecap. “He’d go out looking, I think.”

“That’s what I thought. How do you tell a group of neighborhood kids they’re playing a game wrong?”

“You don’t.” A drone grabbed Steve from behind and lifted him high in the air. He twisted out of its grip just before it could slam him into the ground, getting his legs around its head in a move borrowed from Natasha.

“Hello? Cap? Steve? Are you listening to me?” Iron Man said, as Steve spun the disabled drone like a discus, using momentum to hurl it into another.

“Sorry,” he said, breathing hard. “Your robot was just trying to break my back.”

“It did _what_? Call me crazy, but I’m starting to think these battle drones don’t obey Asimov’s First Law of Robotics.”

Steve understood that reference, thanks to Howard Stark having been a devoted subscriber to _Astounding Science Fiction_. He remembered Howard reading aloud from Asimov’s short story while Steve trained, pausing every so often to derisively comment on all the ways in which science fiction was already getting it wrong. He’d spent half an hour alone ranting about the First Law—“A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm”—calling into question the parameters of everything from “robot” to “human” to “inaction” to “harm.”

“Neither do you,” Steve pointed out.

“Sure, but I’m not a robot.” Iron Man paused. “Oh my god. You thought I was a robot.”

“No, I—” Steve felt his face flushing. “I…considered the possibility,” he admitted.

“You thought I was a _robot_ who’s been _hitting on you_.”

“Is that really so crazy?” Steve felt an inexplicable need to defend himself. “In the forties, I fought a Nazi with a skull for a head.”

“Sure, but he didn’t _hit on you_.” Iron Man paused. “Did he? Please tell me he didn’t, I don’t want to have that much in common with a space-obsessed Nazi with a god complex.”

“Take cover!” Natasha called, right before a drone she’d managed to wrap in a curtain—either affecting its steering, its ability to see where it was going, or both—crashed through the glass roof. The entire ceiling shattered. It was like standing beneath a waterfall: the deafening roar, the shower of crystal-clear-sparkle melding into misty white, Steve hunkering beneath his shield like an umbrella.

He straightened, assessing the scene at a glance. The evacuation was complete: the only people still in the ballroom were Avengers. They’d already taken down at least half the drones. Clint swung out of the way as Thor and a drone he was grappling with in midair barreled toward him, bursting right through the wall into another part of the building. Sam was perched high in a corner, using a detached robot arm like a sniper rifle. Steve had been right about aerial support. He made a mental note to point that out to Fury as he took out another so-called Face of the American Military.

Iron Man was still stuck on Steve’s admission. “Is that why you’ve been turning me down, because you’re not into robots? For the record: unequivocally not a robot over here. I mean, yes, I’m talking through a robot head _now_ , but I myself am not a robot. Not even a cyborg, technically. Just a man with an awesome suit. A totally human, tragically attractive man. Don’t tell me you’re not into _that_.”

“It’s more the supervillain thing that gets me. Falcon, six-two.” Sam fired a grenade. Steve threw his shield to redirect it into a drone that had stuck itself in a particularly hard-to-reach corner.

“Cole Porter was right. You’re way too good.” Iron Man sighed. “Guess that’s what I get for going after the purest, least corruptible, most goody-two-shoes Avenger. The ironic thing, of course, is that if you weren’t so incorruptible, I wouldn’t be nearly as into you.”

“Is that what this is? You want to corrupt Captain America?” Steve didn’t realize he’d picked up the head to continue their conversation until he had to put it down on the one still-standing table in order to not get his head blown off by another plasma beam.

“Worried I’m just in it for the sake of conquest? I get it—you’re afraid this is one of those situations where my friends bet me I couldn’t get the most virginal member of the Avengers to sleep with me, but somewhere along the line I started to develop real feelings, only for you to find out about the wager now that you were just about to give in. Let me put your mind at ease. First off, no one has ever offered me money to have sex with someone—wait. Okay, they have, but that was different, and honestly way below my paygrade. Second, if I was just in it for the challenge, I’d still be after Black Widow. But I’ve been down that road. She nearly had my nuts for soup. Not recommended.”

“Here I thought I was special,” Steve grunted, punching through a drone’s chest just as the one earlier had done. He found the self-destruct button and squeezed, then shoved the drone away before it exploded. “Who else have you propositioned, huh? Thor? The _Hulk_? God, was I your last resort?”

“Aww, honey bear, don’t be jealous. You know I only have eyes for you. The Black Widow thing was years ago. You were but a twinkle in a polar bear’s eye. _I’m_ the one who should be jealous. Don’t think I didn’t notice how cozy you two were coming in. Look, I get it: you obviously want me, but thanks to your stupid noble ideals you feel like you can’t. So you’ve displaced your feelings onto the closest, safest version of a bad boy—or girl, whatever—you can find. You think that because she’s a hero with a dark past, she’ll—who the hell is this?”

Hammer’s assistant—Jennie, Steve thought—was running toward him. “Captain America! Captain!”

“Miss, what are you doing? You need to get back outside, it’s not safe yet.”

“Please—” She grabbed his arm, looking terrified. One of her heels was broken. “Do you know where Hulk is? Can you get him? He’s the only one who can…I think Mr. Hammer…”

“What? What do you think Hammer is doing?”

She didn’t have to answer. The stage floor was rumbling, pulling back into the walls, raining glass into the chasm below. And out of the floor emerged—

“Justin Hammer is an _idiot_ ,” Iron Man said, somewhere between awed and giddy.

It was another robot, but on a massive scale. Twenty-five, maybe thirty feet tall, though with the ceiling gone it was hard to see exactly how it measured up. It looked distinctly unfinished, more like a factory model than a completed product, its dull outer shell streaked with grease.

“Iron Man—” Steve said, a warning in his voice.

“Not me,” Iron Man said immediately. “That thing’s not on this system. Judging by the way it’s moving, I’m guessing Hammer’s controlling it with a joystick.”

The giant mech reeled and staggered, knocking over the one table whose contents had remained miraculously undisturbed. It fired a missile that reduced a pile of rubble into smaller rubble. Steve assumed the mech was trying to target what few drones were left, but its movements were so clumsy and slow that it was hard to say for certain.

Hammer’s assistant was frozen in place, her eyes large and petrified. “C’mon,” Steve said, chivying her along the wall, keeping himself between her and the giant robot lurching around the room. “Find Hammer. Tell him we have things under control. Get him to call that thing _off_.”

Jennie screamed. Steve was just able to get his shield up in time to keep them both from being crushed under a massive foot. For one agonizing moment, Steve held the entire weight of the mech on his shield. The robot swayed, pitched forward, and finally put its other foot down.

“ _Man_ , this is good.” The drone head had fallen into a pile of debris that glittered like a snowdrift. “What do you want to bet Hammer saw the Pacific Rim trailer last week and thought _yeah,_ that’s _the future of warfare_? I wonder—”

The head collapsed beneath the mech’s foot with a pathetically tiny crunch. Steve’s gut clenched. Then his brain caught up, reminding him that it was nothing more than a lifeless hunk of metal.

The mech either had faulty visual sensors or a poor understanding of what a drone was, because it seemed to have decided that Sam was one. It focused all its firepower on him, chasing him around the room with a trail of explosions. “Here!” Sam caught the shield Steve tossed him, swinging it up to block a flurry of bullets.

“Thor!” Steve called. “We could use some lightning!”

Thor ripped a drone’s arm off with his bare hands, then used it like a baseball bat to knock off the head. “I can’t find my hammer!”

“What do you mean? Call it!”

“I _am_ calling it, it’s not coming!”

“Cap, heads up!” said Clint. Steve looked up to see the mech’s foot again bearing down on him. He grabbed his shield, bracing for impact. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Sam’s expression turn to horror.

Sam had his shield.

Steve had grabbed a replica.

The instant before he was crushed into mulch, something scooped him up and lifted him into the air.

It was Iron Man. In the flesh—well, the metal. Which Steve now knew for certain encased the flesh-and-blood body of a man. An allegedly “totally human, tragically handsome” one.

“Are you—Did you put on music?”

“It’s the oldies station. Don’t ask me why they’re playing the fucking Spice Girls.”

Iron Man dropped him onto the mech. Steve slapped the magnetic explosive he’d gotten from the Air Force drone onto its head and activated it, then launched himself from its shoulder like a swimmer kicking off the end of the pool.

The mech’s head exploded in a ball of fire. It fell to its knees with a thud that reverberated throughout the building. Then it collapsed onto the floor, crushing the last active drone beneath its mammoth chest.

Mjolnir, it turned out, had been grabbed by a toddler during the evacuation. The boy’s mother couldn’t understand why her son was suddenly welded to the sidewalk until someone convinced him to put down his new toy. “A worthy child,” Thor said solemnly, autographing the least-damaged Mjolnir replica and editing some of the runes for good measure. “We expect great things of you in the future.”

The mother looked stressed. “The far future,” Steve specified.

“Yes, of course. How many years does it take Midgardians to mature, again? Fifty?”

Predictably, Iron Man had vanished. None of the Avengers had seen him arrive, distracted as they were by the Hammer Drones and the giant robot that moved like it was on a bender and the general ambiance of everything exploding, but some had watched him leave. “He fucked off right after feeling you up to the mellifluous strains of _Wannabe_ ,” Sam said. “At least my date stuck around long enough to buy me pizza.”

“My friend Darcy got me a card to her account,” Thor said. “She’s hoping I’ll improve her credit. I’ve clearly missed a lot—who is the Iron Man, and when did Steve start dating him?”

“Iron Man’s the one who caused all this,” Steve said. “He’s stolen multiple highly dangerous weapons, kidnapped several scientists, and left a trail of destruction across Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“He also ruined a basketball game,” said Sam.

Thor shrugged. “You’ve met my brother. I’m in no place to judge.”

“I’m not dating him,” Steve said, in case that hadn’t been made clear. “And he didn’t ‘feel me up.’ He—” He cleared his throat. “He saved my life.”

“Sometimes,” Thor said sagely, “it can be both.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in this fic's version of the original lineup Thor = Posh, Hulk = Scary, Natasha = Ginger, Clint = Sporty, Steve = Baby agree/disagree
> 
> also lmk if you have any insight into the Kick the Can issue, I'm worried I spent years playing it wrong because Iron Man wasn't around to correct me.


	4. some folks inherit star-spangled eyes

There were very few constants in life, as Steve knew better than anyone. He’d learned to appreciate the rare unchanging things. The warmth of fresh-brewed coffee seeping through his chest on a cold morning. The sight of a dog pulling at its leash to beg attention from passersby. The _fuck you_ attitude of New Yorkers in line at the deli.

Fear that the last wasn’t so immutable after all arose when a man snapped at Steve and his wife pointed out in hushed tones that that was _Captain America_ , only to be put immediately to rest when the guy replied, “I don’t care if he’s George fuckin’ Washington, he’s blocking the goddamn counter.”

One constant he could do without, though, were visits to the doctor. Growing up, he’d often felt like he spent more time in the hospital than out of it, whether for some chronic issue, one of the little things that came up so frequently and seldom stayed little, or the latest life-threatening disease taking its turn at bat in the great game of “what will kill Steve Rogers?”.

Ironically, being transformed into the healthiest man on earth almost consigned him to permanent medical imprisonment. Even on his most miserable days as a dancing monkey, he was glad not to be a lab rat. Finally achieving active duty had one drawback: it put him right back under the harsh lights of the exam ward. SSR doctors watched him like hawks—like the eagle of their logo, more fittingly—running tests and taking samples until he wanted to scream.

And now SHIELD did the same. It was at its most extreme during those first few months post-thaw, of course: they wanted to update his vaccines, make sure the ice hadn’t caused lingering damage, see how their favorite medical oddity had held up over seventy years on the shelf. But Steve still had mandatory physicals after every engagement, as though they didn’t trust him to report his own injuries. He couldn’t get so much as a papercut without SHIELD demanding minute-by-minute updates on how it was healing.

He didn’t have much hope of the situation changing any time soon, but that didn’t stop him from pointedly remarking on how he was the only Avenger _not_ to have sustained an injury during the drone attack. Clint got a first-and-a-half-degree burn in one of the evening’s many explosions. A drone had slammed Sam into the wall, leaving him with a mottled purple bruise all down his side that he swore looked worse than it felt. One of the three ribs he’d broken in Afghanistan had refractured, which made Steve worry that the (finally official) newest member of his team was downplaying his discomfort in classic military fashion. He stopped worrying once he noticed that Sam’s pain only conveniently flared up whenever he wanted Steve to join him for a _Buffy_ marathon.

Thor, known to generations of mankind as the all-powerful God of Thunder, had managed to get electrocuted. He’d been unconscious for a full two minutes and thirteen seconds—as determined by the last Spice Girls lyric he remembered before blacking out ( _if you want my future, forget my past_ ) and the first after coming to again ( _slam your body down and zig-a-zig-ah_ )—meaning he missed out on both Steve taking down the giant mech and “finding out whatever those women really, really wanted.”

Bruce, seeking refuge from the commotion, had stubbed his toe so hard it broke.

“Hey,” Steve said bracingly, “at least it didn’t bring out the big guy. That’s good, right?”

Bruce shook his head. “A little old lady with a _walker_ and an _oxygen tank_ came to see if I needed help. I _wish_ I’d been able to get mad. It might’ve helped my dignity.”

Natasha had broken a nail.

The Avengers’ injuries, such as they were, accounted for the worst of the casualties. No civilian suffered anything more extreme than a sprained ankle; most had emerged completely unscathed. News anchors wasted no time in declaring the lack of carnage a downright miracle.

Steve wasn’t sure he’d go that far. The hijacked drones may not have obeyed Asimov’s law to the letter, but they hadn’t outright defied it, either. They’d taken much more interest in damaging property than people. Even then, he’d noticed they only targeted people who targeted them first, completely ignoring the panicking partygoers streaming around them to reach the exits. None of the Avengers would have been able to stop the first drone from killing Justin Hammer on stage if it had tried. Why hadn’t it?

He would be the first to admit that lives had been in danger. There was a world of difference between shooting someone in the head and blowing up a piece of furniture several yards away, but there was just as wide a difference between the latter and _not_ turning battle drones loose on a party. That nobody had been seriously injured was undeniably lucky. But Steve wouldn’t call it a miracle.

Prospect Park had changed, but in a funny way that itself was a constant. Even when he was growing up, the landscape of the park had been in eternal flux. When Steve and Bucky were seven, they showed up to Children’s Corner to discover a wooden booth occupying their favorite marble-playing spot. Two years later, the Picnic House burned down and was quickly rebuilt. The Conservatory underwent a thorough renovation in the winter of ’29. An entire Mount Vernon replica was built for Washington’s 200th birthday in 1932 and dismantled the same year. The zoo opened, the dairy closed. Lookout Hill Reservoir got filled in. New playgrounds sprouted around the perimeter like weeds. The library, which had been under construction since well before Steve was born, opened its doors in time for his twenty-third birthday. America entered the war, and soldiers came marching in, manning batteries, dumping ammunition, and carving slit trenches around Swan Boat Lake.

People still strolled along tree-shaded paths, but now they talked on cell phones. Bucky was gone, but the goddamn wooden booth endured. God only knew how many generations of pigeons had come and gone, but for all that Steve could tell, watching them swarm each chunk of bread he tossed, they might as well have been the same exact birds he’d last fed in ’43 before shipping off to Basic.

“Captain America?”

This, at least, was unique to 2013: a woman with a pink pixie cut looking at Steve like he was King Arthur, just emerged dripping-wet from the lake gripping Excalibur. She looked about Steve’s age—mid-twenties, that was, not nineties.

“I just wanted to thank you,” she said, twisting her shirt in her hands. “For what you did in Queens last month. And last year, too, all of New York. And”—she huffed a laugh—“while I’m at it, I guess World War Two? I mean, I wasn’t alive then, but obviously I still benefit from America not having been taken over by Nazis, so.”

“Happy to have helped,” Steve said, offering a friendly smile he hoped would put her at ease. “I’m Steve.”

“Elena.” She bit the inside of her cheek, looking like she was debating whether to say more. He waited. “My mom was there,” she said in a rush. “In Queens. Not at the party or anything, she was just walking by and—explosions. She ended up holding back this really drunk guy who kept trying to get back inside.”

“I think I know the one,” Steve said wryly.

“Yeah. He was—well, he’s a real fucking asshole. He accused Mom of _assaulting_ him.” Steve blinked. “I guess he sprained his wrist or something, and he claimed it was her fault, but she never even _touched_ his wrist.”

Steve was willing to bet the guy had actually hurt his wrist attacking a battle drone from behind with a folding chair. “Is your mom all right?”

“Yeah, there were a ton of witnesses, so she was totally cleared. But. It also came up—I mean, they found out—that she’s not here legally. Which isn’t really her fault, my dad—well—it was a long time ago, and things were—”

She broke off helplessly. Steve nodded. He knew the song, if not the verse. In his day, it had been anyone of Chinese descent—or anyone believed to be, accuracy be damned—who was suspected of being “one of those illegals,” here to steal Americans’ jobs and food and money at a time when there was so little of any of it to be had. Then, more or less overnight, Americans found themselves in a war in which China was one of their most crucial allies. Steve remembered the scramble to realign, how the racist caricatures had abruptly disappeared from political cartoons, how the opinions page was suddenly full of long, thoughtful essays in which distinguished academics expounded on the noble history of the Chinese race. The _Japanese_ were the illegal ones. Including, somehow, those who had been American citizens since birth. If Emma Lazarus’ poem hadn’t been inconveniently carved in stone, Steve suspected it would have been updated weekly with exceptions.

_“Give me your tired, your poor,_

_Your huddled masses* yearning to breathe free…_

_*unless they’re ~~German~~ ~~Irish~~ ~~Italians~~ ~~Jews~~ ~~Chinese~~ ~~Japanese~~ Mexican_

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “If I had known—”

“No, it’s fine,” she assured him. “I mean, obviously it’s not fine, it’s super messed up, but—the ironic thing is, a week ago, I would have _killed_ to run into you like this. We were desperate. It’s such an obvious injustice, right? Mom saves this guy’s life, and he tries to get her deported. We wanted to get someone— _anyone_ —to pay attention, but we didn’t know how. We don’t have, like, ‘connections.’ A friend of a friend of a friend wrote a blog post, and we were hoping it’d get picked up by Buzzfeed or something, but not that many people saw it. I got in contact with this guy who runs a social justice podcast, and he was…kind of brutally honest. He said that for every worthy cause that goes viral and raises a million dollars on GoFundMe and becomes a heartwarming Upworthy video, there are hundreds just like it that don’t. The bullshit just…happens. We thought ours would be one of those.”

Elena took a deep, unsteady breath. “I still don’t know _how_ , but—last week, Mom got a call from a lawyer. We Googled him, and he’s—he’s _the_ lawyer. Like, the number-one guy for immigration cases. And he wants to represent her. For _free_.”

Steve wound up giving Elena his number, just in case there was something he could do—the kind of help that didn’t call for muscles, even. “It couldn’t hurt to have Captain America vouching for you to stay in this country, right?” She responded by throwing her arms around him.

“Sorry,” she said, cheeks as pink as her hair.

“It’s fine,” he said, returning the hug as hard as he could without hurting her. He could remember his great-grandmother sitting by the window, watching the Klu Klux Klan parade down the street tossing candy to children. Under her breath, traces of an Irish accent lilting the words, she was muttering: “Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, with conquering limbs astride from land to land…” She didn’t pause for breath when she reached the end of the poem, just started at the beginning again, and again, the entire length of the parade. “‘I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’”

She died a few weeks later, the same day Congress passed an anti-immigration law promoted under the slogan “Shut the Door.” Steve remembered his mother holding his hand at the funeral, the way her lips had thinned as she’d said, “Nan always embraced this country, Stevie, always. Even when it didn’t embrace her back.”

People tended to assume Steve was the ultimate blind patriot, but his eyes had been open to the hypocrisy of the American dream since he was five years old. He’d wanted to fight for his country as much because he knew about its flaws as because he believed in its virtues. If there was going to be a Captain America—a new _new_ colossus—Steve would make damn sure he always hugged back.

Steve met Tony Stark and a woman he thought might be Tony’s secretary coming out of a SHIELD conference room. “Captain Rogers, you must be observant. Has Fury’s eyepatch switched sides?”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“I swear it used to be on the right. I bet he’s just constantly streaming Netflix. Every time he goes quiet and gives you a look like he’s seen how you’re gonna die and he’s not impressed, it’s because they’re doing a big show-stopping number on _Glee_. He gives you those looks too, right? Or am I just special?”

“Hi, I’m Pepper,” the woman said, holding her hand out.

“Steve. Pleasure to meet you.”

“Why do you do that?” Tony asked Pepper. “When you introduce yourself like that, you make me look rude.”

“Maybe you make yourself look rude.”

“I was _getting_ there. I’m great at introductions. Look: Pepper, Steve has half an art degree. Steve, Pepper’s still pissed at me for donating our modern art collection. See? Common ground.”

“Two Courbets,” Pepper told Steve. “A perfectly matched Larionov and Goncharova. Four van Rysselberghes—”

“Pre- or post-Pointillism?”

“Both.”

Steve winced. “I’m sorry.”

“Here’s my issue,” Tony said. “It’s supposed to be ‘modern art,’ but some of these paintings are, what, a hundred and fifty years old by now? MoMA should have a yearly cull. Out with the old, in with the new, that’s what I always say.”

“I’ll try not to take that personally,” Steve said drily.

“I’m sorry about him,” Pepper said. “He’s a futurist.”

“Why do you say that like it’s a dirty word? You make it sound like I have no appreciation of history.”

“Black Sabbath doesn’t count.”

“I love lots of old stuff,” Tony insisted. “Really old stuff. Titian. Togas. Tchaikovsky.”

Pepper snorted. To Steve, she said, “He once told the lead in _Swan Lake_ that his favorite part was when they got married at the end.”

“I blame the animators of the 1994 musical adaptation for taking gross liberties with the source material. Though, c’mon, who doesn’t prefer a happy ending? Other than the ballerina. She left without giving me one.”

“The original ballet adaptation of _Romeo and Juliet_ had a happy ending,” Steve said. Tony and Pepper looked at him in surprise. “I only know because Bucky dated the makeup girl at the Met for a few weeks,” he admitted. “That’s how I saw _Giselle_. I’ve heard it’s even better from the front.”

“I think they’re doing _Giselle_ this season, actually,” Pepper said. “Tony has a box at the Met.”

“I do?” Tony said. “Right, I do—that’s where I was supposed to be watching _Swan Lake_ from, instead of—it doesn’t matter what I was doing. Great idea, let’s all go see _Giselle_. Is that the one where the guy falls in love with the girl and she turns out to be a robot? I like that one.”

“That’s _Coppélia_ ,” Pepper said. “Sort of.”

“I don’t want to put you out—” Steve began.

Tony waved him off. “No, I’m due anyway. I have to get at least two doses of culture a year, or I start talking entirely in WWE references and they kick me off the board of the Philharmonic. And then who would force them to put on a Star Wars concert every May fourth? Are you seeing anyone, Captain? The more the merrier.”

“Not intentionally,” Steve said. It occurred to him that Pepper hadn’t actually introduced herself as Tony’s secretary; he could have completely misinterpreted their relationship. “Are you two—”

“God, no,” Pepper said, at the same moment Tony said, “Definitely not.” They kept talking over each other, leaving Steve only able to catch the most alarming phrases.

“We flirted with—well, flirting—”

“—a total mess—”

“—tiny explosion, really, more _pop_ than _boom_ —”

“—deathly allergic—”

“—mild cardiac arrest—”

“—we decided it would be a bad idea.”

“Rogers,” Fury said, appearing in the doorway of the conference room. “Go ahead in, the meeting will start once Dr. Banner arrives. Stark. You’re still here.”

“Looks that way,” Tony said.

Fury stared at him in long, unblinking silence.

“It’s _Don’t Stop Believing_ , isn’t it? Can’t go wrong with a classic. I think they should cover _more_ Journey, if anything—”

“We were just leaving,” Pepper said, dragging Tony away with practiced endurance. “Goodbye, Director. It was nice meeting you, Steve. I’ll send you the info for the ballet.”

Fury cut directly to the chase. “We need to figure out what Iron Man’s up to, and we need to put an end to it.”

“We’ve had our analysts mine data from every recorded incident of the last four years,” Coulson said, pulling up a series of impressive-looking maps and graphs. “Looking for patterns, commonalities—in method, target, timing, location, outcome. We’re still missing a smoking gun, but we’ve got a shortlist of places to start.”

Steve scanned the list Coulson pulled up. A couple things jumped out—most notably _possible vendetta against Stark Industries_ —but he didn’t see that SHIELD’s analysts had managed to mine any data that wasn’t already pretty obvious.

“What about his obsession with Steve?” Sam asked. “I don’t see that on your list.”

“You’re assuming that’s genuine,” said Agent Hill. “I think it’s more likely just another example of him trying to confuse the scent. If we buy into it, he’s succeeding.”

“He’s been pretty consistent about it, though. And _in_ sistent.”

“And public,” Natasha said. “It could be an insidious optics thing—get the public to start associating Captain America with Iron Man, terrorism, things getting blown up.”

“A connection which would be all the stronger if he succeeds in his seduction,” said Thor.

Clint shook his head. “I don’t think it’s that deep. Iron Man’s not really trying to get in Steve’s pants, he’s trying to get under his skin.”

“But why save his life?” asked Fury.

“Hammer was controlling the giant mech,” Sam said. “Maybe Iron Man _is_ obsessed with Steve, but in the way where he wants to be the one who gets to kill him.”

“Or Iron Man’s just toying with him,” Maria said.

“I don’t know,” said Thor. “I was once kidnapped by a love-crazed sorceress who tried to force me into matrimony. Perhaps Iron Man plans to do the same to Steve.”

“But then he’d have to reveal who he was,” Bruce pointed out. “I don’t think they’d just let him sign the marriage license ‘Iron Man.’”

“Even in Vegas?”

“I don’t think that’s it,” Coulson said. “I agree with Agents Hill and Barton. Which isn’t to say,” he hastened to add, “that someone _couldn’t_ be genuinely obsessed with Captain Rogers.”

“Of course not.”

“Many people are.”

“I mean, it would make sense, even for a supervillain. Just look at him.”

Everyone did. Steve felt his face heat. He cleared his throat. “How did you deal with it?” he asked Natasha, to deflect attention.

“With what?” She raised an eyebrow.

“He said he tried hitting on you and you…shut him down.” Steve figured that was a more tactful way of conveying “she nearly had my nuts for soup.”

Now both eyebrows were raised. “He’s never come on to me.”

Steve felt his brow furrow. “He said he did. Back in the day.” He waved his hand generally at the section of the timeline before he’d been unfrozen, where the dots were more spread out.

“Nope.”

“Maybe he did and you didn’t notice?” Steve tried.

“Because he’s clearly a master of subtlety, and I’m famously unobservant,” Natasha said.

Steve coughed. “Right.”

“Which just lends further credence to the theory that it’s all for show.”

Sam sighed. “So you’re saying luring Iron Man into a Princess Peach trap is a nonstarter.”

“I don’t know who Princess Peach is,” Steve said, before someone else could answer, “but if I’m supposed to be her, it’s definitely a nonstarter.”

“Trapping him isn’t such a bad idea,” said Natasha. She nodded at the list. “He has a thing for kidnapping eminent scientists. We have an eminent scientist right here.”

This time everyone looked at Bruce. “With an even more eminent friend,” he said, warning in his tone.

“We wouldn’t actually let him kidnap you,” Sam said.

Coulson refocused the display to feature data on the kidnappings. “The first was a mechanical engineer. He could’ve been taken to work on the suit—we still don’t know where Iron Man got it, whether he built it himself or had someone do it for him. The next was an agrophysicist. Then Dr. Tano, the climatologist. All three were taken after it was announced they were recipients of prestigious awards.”

“So we make up a fake award and say we’re giving it to Bruce.”

“Iron Man’s proven to know things he shouldn’t before,” Steve said. “If he can connect Dr. Banner to SHIELD, he could sense a trap.”

“I think it’s worth a try,” Bruce said, surprising them all. He shrugged. “If the other guy _does_ come out, it’ll be worse for him than for me.”

“If we want to avoid Hulk-related contingencies altogether,” Clint said, “what about Tony Stark, the guy who just left here twenty minutes ago? He’s also a leading scientist.”

“Tony Stark’s a civilian,” Steve said. “I don’t want to drag him into this, especially not as bait.”

Fury nodded. “That,” he said, “and it would be too tempting just to let Iron Man have him.”

They put Bruce up in a hotel in Midtown, hours before the imaginary ceremony was supposed to start. Clint and Natasha were in the room with him, staying carefully away from the window. Thor and Steve waited in connecting rooms on either side. Sam was stationed on the roof, ready to swoop down and cut off Iron Man’s retreat.

“Oops, wrong window,” Iron Man said, glass shattering around him. “Oh well—love the one you’re with, right?” He wrapped an arm around Steve’s waist and took off backward through the window like a bottle rocket.

Steve’s arms were pinned to his sides to keep him from struggling. He could probably break free if he tried, but the prospect quickly lost appeal as the ground receded. They’d started from the fortieth floor, and already they were five hundred feet up, eight hundred, a thousand.

“Where are you taking me?” Steve asked after they’d flown higher than any building in New York, raising his voice to be heard over the whistling wind. He tried to keep his teeth from chattering. The cold was all in his head—his suit, in combination with the serum, was meant to keep him comfortable at temperatures between -30 and 120 degrees—but ever since the ice he kept imagining he felt it anyway.

“My secret moon lair. We’ve come to the ‘if I can’t have you, no one can’ stage of our relationship, where I display your taxidermied body alongside my childhood cat. We called her Hydra, because for every mouse head you threw away, she’d leave two more on the mat. You holding on tight? I need my arms free in case I see any geese. They’re gonna pay for what they did to Sully’s plane.”

Steve had done a lot of thinking since the meeting where everyone—everyone but him, that was—debated what Iron Man meant by his advances: _if_ he meant them, how much he meant them, why he could have meant them, why he probably didn’t. He’d gone back over every encounter in his mind, his own painstaking form of data mining.

It wasn’t the comments on his ass that stood out, in retrospect. It was Iron Man saying, “This is much less fun when you’re looking at me like you think I might be about to haul off on a mass-murder spree” and swearing not to release the virus. And though he’d immediately undermined that promise with some of his typical bullshit suggesting he didn’t mean it, so far he’d kept his word.

It was how insistent he’d been that Steve know he was human. It was the idea that Steve was “too good,” the sound of the truth lurking beneath the admission that “if you weren’t so incorruptible, I wouldn’t be nearly as into you.” It was the fact that Iron Man had shown up to the drone attack only to save Steve’s life and put him in a position to take the mech down.

“You like me.”

Iron Man snorted. “You’re not going to win any prizes for that observation, Cap. I think I’ve made my feelings pretty clear.”

“I don’t mean your double entendres or your corny come-ons—”

“ _Corny_?”

“—I think you genuinely like me. And you’re not gonna hurt me.”

A beat passed. “What makes you so sure of that?” Iron Man’s tone was so deliberately neutral it was as though he were trying to retroactively convince Steve he really was a robot.

Steve shrugged—as best he could in his current position, anyway, which was not very well. “For a supervillain, you’ve kind of gone out of your way to convince me you’re not such a bad guy.”

“Is this one of those ‘look into your heart, come into the light’ speeches? Sorry to disappoint, Cap, but I’m not in the market for a redemption story.”

“Your attacks haven’t killed anyone. You set off a bunch of robots, then saved me from being crushed by one. You’ve had plenty of opportunities to hurt or even kill me and haven’t.”

“I’m a villain, Cap,” Iron Man said. His voice had gone flat, all traces of teasing humor gone. “I have my reasons. Don’t flatter yourself. Just because I think you have a nice ass doesn’t mean I’d shed a tear if you died. Or that I’m not still considering doing it myself. Not even you could survive a two-thousand-feet fall onto concrete.”

“Hmm,” Steve said, letting that sink in. Then he let go.

He had a few long moments to contemplate the possibility that he’d misjudged before metal arms wrapped around him tight enough to crack his ribs had he been other than superhuman.

“What the _fuck_ , Steve!” There was real anger in Iron Man’s voice—maybe real fear, too.

Steve grinned. “You like me.”

“Are you fucking suicidal? I could have— You would have—”

“You _like_ me.”

“This doesn’t prove _anything_ , smartass. I could just be waiting to kill you in a more painful way later.”

“Taxidermied on the moon, right?”

“Shut _up_ ,” Iron Man growled, and it sent a shiver through Steve’s body. For the first time, even through the modulating effect of the suit, Iron Man sounded _human_.

He had regained his normal cool by the time they touched down within the narrow railing encircling the Statue of Liberty’s torch.

“Hope this isn’t too awkward for you, new flame meeting old flame.” Iron Man gestured between himself and the torch. “See, back in the sixties there was this cartoon somebody drew of you defiling Lady Liberty. I think in Arlington Cemetery. Really kinky stuff—”

“I know,” Steve interrupted. “I’ve seen the documentary.”

“Which documentary? There’s a million of ‘em. The History Channel has a six-part miniseries about one day of leave you took in 1944. Takes almost as long to watch as it must’ve to live through. Honestly, it’s not bad. Surprisingly entertaining, though sadly lacking in sex scenes.”

“This one wasn’t about me,” Steve said. “It was about Captain America. It had interviews with…everyone.” There were too many to list: US presidents, past and present; veterans and current servicemen/women; academics; artists of every stripe and color. Steve couldn’t even remember half of them. “Who was that guy who made that movie?”

“God, you boomer. What movie?”

“The one with the motorcycles.”

“ _Easy Rider_. Classic. Hell of a soundtrack.”

“Right. They interviewed that guy. And Peggy. Tony Stark. They even had old footage of Howard.”

“I know the one. It’s also got a killer soundtrack, especially for a documentary. I mean, _Fortunate Son_ is ridiculously overused, but if there was ever a fitting occasion…”

 _Fortunate Son_ may have been overused to everyone else, but to Steve it was fresh, and its lyrics hit like a punch in the gut. For nearly three hours, he’d watched the documentary dissect Captain America, breaking him down as a symbol, a legacy, a star-spangled inheritance. They traced his appearances in propaganda and counterculture, in comic books and movies, in the halls of academia and high school history books. There was Captain America cheerfully showing kids how to hide beneath their desks if Russia dropped the nuke. There was Captain America exhorting boys who hadn’t been born when he’d gone into the ice to go die in a war he’d never heard of. There was Captain America bending Lady Liberty over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. There was Captain America flashing a peace sign and draped in flowers.

“I told Fury I didn’t think I should put the suit back on, after watching that.”

“What, why? Unless you mean you want to go back to your old army duds. Because I could get behind that. Literally, I would—you know what, screw innuendo, I’ll just say it. I would like to fuck you in your army uniform.”

Steve gripped the railing, looking out over the dark stain of the Hudson. “I’m not as naïve as people think,” he said. “Captain America was born in a propaganda office. It’s always been a role I was assigned. Hell, that was all it was supposed to be—an empty costume. I was the one who chose to make it real. It wasn’t so hard then, to make him what people wanted. Someone strong and brave, someone out there punching Nazis, carrying the flag. I could do those things.

“But now…Captain America has seventy extra years of baggage. He’s been through shit I wasn’t around to see. He’s said things I never said. I don’t know who he’s supposed to be anymore. Or what he’s supposed to be fighting for. I woke up one day and they told me the conflict I dedicated my life to, I gave my life _for_ , was resolved half a century ago—but how about I fight aliens now? Fine. I did that. And now? There’s no Hitler. No Red Skull. Not even a Loki. Why should there still be a Captain America?”

The movie had waded deep into the ongoing battle over Captain America’s legacy, documenting the attempts of wildly different groups to co-opt his iconic imagery. Captain America, gay icon. Captain America, racist meme. Captain America, effigy of Western imperialism. He’d already seen the emergence of a new version of himself since his return: Captain America, 21st-century Jesus, back from the dead.

There was no way for Steve, for anyone, to live up—or down, as the case may be—to it all. He couldn’t be all things to all people. Captain America had spilled out of the panel he’d been drawn into, had overflowed the entire page, bled off the edge of the paper. He contained multitudes, reflecting as many different dreams and meanings and ideals as people projected onto him. It seemed arrogant, even irresponsible, to try reducing him back to just one man. One all-too-human man, who had never been perfect, no matter what people said.

“Hey.” Iron Man spread his arms. “You looking for a villain to define yourself against? I’m right here.”

Steve snorted. “Are you offering yourself as a false flag? Or are you suggesting that’s what you’ve been up to all along—doing me the favor of being my enemy?”

“Somebody’s got to lay down on that wire,” Iron Man said, exaggeratedly serious.

Steve shook his head. “It’s almost convincing, that noble villain act. Or it might be, if you hadn’t tried selling yourself as irredeemably evil just a few minutes ago.”

Iron Man shrugged. “Sometimes I contradict myself. I’m only human.”

“Right.” Steve’s eyes drifted to the smooth red metal of Iron Man’s chest plate. “Guess that means you’ve got a heart beating somewhere in that tin can.”

“That is part of the standard package,” Iron Man agreed. “Along with…other features.”

“About that,” Steve said. He took a deliberate step forward. “What exactly is your plan if I ever take you up on your offer? If I said I wanted a taste of your…what’d you call it? Berserker Rod?” He took another step, looked down at the armor’s codpiece, frowned. “Huh,” he said, dragging innocent eyes back to Iron Man’s faceplate. “Unless that suit of yours has a feature I’m not seeing, I don’t see how you plan to fulfill that promise. Or fulfill…other things.”

“Fuck—” Iron Man breathed. “Fucking _Christ_.” He took a step back, wobbling slightly on the platform. “Jesus, Cap—you win this round, okay? I mean, have I _thought_ about building a retractable metal dick into my armor? Obviously. It’s one of the first things you think when you decide to build a suit of armor. Have I gone as far as roughing up some specs? I _hadn’t_ until you accused me of being a _sex robot_ the other week—”

“That’s not exactly what I—”

“I gotta go,” Iron Man said, a feverish pitch to his words. “I gotta get to the lab.” He fired up his repulsors, lifting into the darkening air.

“Wait,” Steve said, stepping to the edge of the railing. For all that he’d supposedly won this round, he felt as knocked off-balance as ever by the abruptness of Iron Man’s comings and goings.

“What?” Iron Man flew back to the railing, hovering right at eye level on the other side. For all that Steve hadn’t wanted to be Princess Peach in Sam’s honeypot scenario, it didn’t escape him that in this position, trapped on this little balcony, he was essentially playing Juliet.

“What?” his erstwhile Romeo repeated. “You can find your own way down, Steve, I have to design a high-tech dildo.”

It was no _but soft, what light through yonder window breaks_ , that was for sure. But to be perfectly fair, Steve didn’t go around speaking in iambic pentameter himself.

“Did you really have a cat?” he asked.

“What?” Iron Man said a third time. “Oh, right, the cat. Yes and no. Her name wasn’t Hydra.”

“What was it?”

Iron Man flew back, did a loop-de-loop in the air. From the ground, Steve imagined he looked like a moth circling Lady Liberty’s flame. He snapped Steve a smart salute. “We called her the Yowling Commando.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> will Tony actually show up at the ballet, or will he desperately try to find a nonexistent New Line Cinema adaptation of _Giselle_? will Steve ever finish the other half of his art degree? did I drive off readers by threatening future scenes featuring an Iron Dildo? tune in next week to find out! (note: answers to these questions may come next week, later on, or never at all)


	5. fly me to the moon

“ _Steve_.”

“Hmm?”

Sam’s unimpressed look indicated that this wasn’t the first time he’d tried to get Steve’s attention. Two days had passed since their attempt to prevent Iron Man kidnapping Bruce had resulted in Steve’s kidnapping instead, and he was still stuck on the same questions he’d gone to bed with that night. Who was Iron Man? Why did he do the things he did? Did he genuinely believe himself to be a villain, or did he see himself as the hero of his own story? How serious had he been about making those modifications to his suit?

“Steve!”

He started, having forgotten Sam’s presence all over again. “Sorry,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Guess I’m a little out of it.”

“No shit.” Sam shook his head. “Unbelievable. You’re zoning out on me like I’m _The English Patient_ —add that to your not to-do list, life’s too short— _and_ you used up all the hot water. I guess the perfect man really doesn’t exist.”

“Wait, do you live here? Do _I_ live here? Whose apartment is this?”

“You’ve got the good-smelling soap,” Sam said, shrugging, like that explained any part of this. If Steve kept drifting out of it, he was going to have a hard time distinguishing between things that didn’t make sense because he’d been distracted and things that didn’t make sense because he’d been turned into a super soldier in the 1940s, which meant his life subsequently included glowing space cubes and skull-headed Nazis and alien invasions and _The Matrix Reloaded_.

“I was wondering if you wanted to come to group today,” Sam said, clapping Steve on the knee.

Steve didn’t tag along on Sam’s counseling sessions very often. Though he felt like a dick even thinking it, the truth was that none of the other vets really understood what he was going through. Sam said the best part of group therapy was when people realized that they weren’t as alone in their suffering as they’d thought, that many others shared the same feelings, the same experiences. Unfortunately, Steve didn’t think his chances of discovering others who shared _his_ experiences—going from 4-F reject to the world’s first superhero, spending 66 years in a coma, finding out that 99% of the people he knew were dead and the other 1% in nursing homes, questioning his legacy as a sociopolitical icon and mythohistorical figure, regularly doing battle with a self-proclaimed supervillain whose only stated motivation was wanting to sleep with him—were very high.

He'd seen a SHIELD therapist his first few months post-ice, but those sessions hadn’t been for him any more than the post-battle checkups were. For all the shrink’s talk of “nurturing your mental and emotional wellbeing,” her only goal was to confirm that trauma hadn’t made him lose his sanity and to clear him for service, preferably yesterday. Knowing full well that everything he said would be reported to a murderers’ row of interested parties, Steve had told them what they wanted to hear—how everything in the 21st century was too loud and too fast; how he sure did miss his friends; how, yeah, spending the weekend at that cabin upstate _had_ helped clear his head; how he’d had this crazy thought that his loved ones would probably want him to carry on and be happy, you know?

He almost worried he’d laid it on too thick until he got a glimpse of the therapist’s notes. _Amazing progress_, she’d written. _Gold star!_

Even if no one at the VA could relate to Steve’s exact situation, at least they wouldn’t make him feel _more_ worn-out and suspicious. He needed to get out of his own head, that much was clear.

Sam’s group sessions were open to veterans regardless of what branch or conflict they’d served in. Ranks and recognitions were left at the door, which meant Steve didn’t have to worry about encountering a retired general who wasn’t sure whether he should be saluting Steve or vice-versa.

“I think the worst thing is feeling like none of it even mattered.” Gomez had a ready smile and an easy way of befriending anyone, which made his rare serious moments register all the more heavily. “My platoon spent six months liberating one town. Three guys in the same squad died. One of my buddies lost half his leg. It was _hell_ , but—we achieved something, you know? Yesterday I found out that the Taliban moved back in. We lost the town. And now the US is retreating. So what was the _fucking_ point?”

“I hear ya,” said Petras, who fit every grizzled stereotype of the Vietnam vet with the exception of his sparkly pink nails. “All I heard when I got home was how we shouldn’t even be in the war. Not saying I disagree, but it sure didn’t make it easier.”

“‘Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong. They’re still there, he’s all gone.’” Payne, a Gulf War vet, had shown up to every group therapy session as long as anyone could remember. He rarely spoke except to quote a song or movie.

“It’d be nice to feel totally confident that I’d made a difference, a positive one,” said Garelick, who’d served two tours in Iraq but still looked like a teenager. She turned to Steve. “At least you got to be in the one war everyone agrees was just.”

“Let’s try to refrain from ‘at least _you_ ’ or ‘must be nice’ statements,” Sam interjected. “I get where you’re coming from, but that kind of comparison can be destructive.”

“Sorry, Cap.”

“It’s okay.” Steve preferred to just listen, but now that he’d been directly addressed he should probably say something. He took a moment to gather his thoughts. “When I was growing up, people still hoped that World War One would be the War to End All Wars. Not just because of how destructive it was, but because there had been no good reason for it, and nothing was really accomplished by it. But if it made mankind finally see the light, if we all agreed never again, maybe it hadn’t all been in vain.”

The ghost of a smile crossed his lips. “I know I made a difference. Fighting Nazis, keeping the world from blowing up—that’s about as unambiguous as it gets. But I wake up over sixty years later, and we’re in another war. Go forward another sixty, a hundred, whatever—I’m betting humanity will be in a whole new crop of conflicts. It can feel a little pointless, when you look at it like that.

“But when I enlisted, I wasn’t thinking that big. I wasn’t thinking about saving the world. I just wanted to do what I could. Find some small way to help. Most of my missions _were_ small, in the grand scheme of things. Derailing a train to delay the enemy by one day. Striking a factory to bring their output down 2%. Saving three dozen prisoners out of seventeen _million_ —and of that three dozen, half went on to die in the war anyway. What difference did I really make in buying them a few short months?”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “If a kid falls and scrapes his knee, is that going to matter one hundred years from now? No. But the pain matters to that kid _now_. If you can help alleviate it, who cares about the grand scheme of things? The grand scheme of things isn’t where we live our lives. That’s not where people are suffering.

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t question why we’re at war. But even if a war isn’t just, your individual actions—the calls you made, the effort you took to keep people safe—can be. Even if the difference you made is small, even if it doesn’t last. If you were able to make things better for just one person, for one moment, that’s something.”

“I can’t believe Captain America’s gonna take my job. Some hero you turned out to be.”

Steve laughed. “You’re paranoid.”

“I’m gonna call in sick one of these days and it’ll turn into Cap Heals Humanity, Thursdays at seven. Every session will be life-changing. Some guy will be like ‘I went on a date, I guess it went all right,’ and you’ll launch into a rousing speech on the Importance of Putting Yourself Out There that will bring everyone to tears. They’ll be married by sundown.”

“Do I get to go to the wedding?”

“You’ll be the one officiating.” Sam’s eyes narrowed. Across the room, Gomez was saying something in Garelick’s ear, his hand low on her back. She laughed, leaning into his touch. “Now I know how my dad felt when I was in high school,” Sam muttered. “You’re constitutionally the boss of them, right? Can you tell them they need to leave room for Jesus?”

“Once the promotions really started coming, I stopped paying attention to the details,” Steve admitted. “But I don’t remember anything about having the authority to stop two consenting adults from getting cozy. Sorry.”

“It’s the principle of the thing, you know? Don’t be trying to hook up at _therapy_.”

Steve shrugged. “Having these kinds of talks, sharing how you feel with people who have been through the same shit… It’s not surprising that you might forge intense bonds.”

“That’s what worries me. Last thing either of them needs right now is _intensity_.” Sam sighed. “I mean, I get it. I barely left my house for months when I got back from my second tour. And when I finally did, it was just to come here. For a lot of these guys, this is the only place they really interact with anyone. Do you hear how I’m talking about me and them, but really I’m talking about you?”

Steve blinked. “No.”

“Do you ever hang out with anyone you don’t work with?”

“I used to, with you,” Steve pointed out. “I could kick you off the team, if that would help.”

“Please. Who else is going to be Cap’s personal air-taxi? Or catch your dumb ass every time you decide to fall off a building? Look, I’m saying this as your friend, not a professional: you’re going crazy.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re not saying that as a professional.”

“You’re the type of guy who needs a project. Concrete goals. Without that, anyone can see you’re at loose ends. Don’t act like I didn’t catch you Googling ‘how to start a podcast’ the other day.”

“I have a project,” Steve protested. “Iron Man. Figuring out what he wants, how to take him down.”

“A non-work project.”

“I volunteer—”

“That’s work, too,” Sam interrupted. “With you, work, life, calling—it’s all the same. You’re Captain America. Helping people is literally what you do. _All_ you do. You need something just for you, something selfish. A hobby. Didn’t you used to draw?”

Steve made a face. “Art’s moved on a lot since then. And I wasn’t exactly Picasso to start with.”

“So? I like running, but I’m not exactly Captain America.” Sam smiled wryly. “Dude, take your own advice. Think a little smaller.”

“Is that me?”

Steve looked up. The woman who’d spoken had her head tilted, long dark hair falling over her shoulder. The way she was biting her full lower lip would have gotten her labeled a vamp in the forties. Steve looked back down at his sketchpad, where he’d been shading the wrinkled neck of an extremely old man.

“Uh,” he said.

“There.” She pointed to the opposite page, which was filled with dozens of quick sketches of the people sitting outside at the National Gallery café.

“Oh!” That must be her, in profile, between the gesture drawing of the man bending over to pick up his wallet and the study of a little girl half-bathed in shadow. “Sorry,” he said, feeling himself redden. He used to do this all the time back in school—one of his teachers was insistent that artists had to “become Peeping Toms with pencils”—but he’d never gotten caught. People tended to look right through him then. Either he’d forgotten how to observe surreptitiously, or he was just more noticeable now.

“Don’t be! I’m flattered.” The woman tucked her hair behind her ear, smiling flirtatiously. “I could give you my number—you know, in case you ever want me to pose for you on purpose.”

“Thanks, but I’m—” He had to stop himself from saying _involved with someone_. He was not dating Iron Man. Calling his bluff on his ability to follow through on his amorous threats did not equate to a promise of commitment. “Not available,” he said instead. _That_ was inarguably true.

The woman looked disappointed, but unlike Iron Man she accepted the rejection for what it was. (Though now that Steve thought about it, he wasn’t sure he’d ever explicitly rejected Iron Man’s advances. He’d pretty much banked on there being an implicit “no” in their respective statuses as superhero and supervillain.)

He tried to be more circumspect when he returned to his sketch, not letting his gaze linger too long on the wrinkled man he was drawing. That was a valuable exercise too, gathering as much information as possible from a single glance. Shapes and angles, light and shadow. It was all muscle memory. Unwanted thoughts—like how the man had probably been born a good ten years after Steve, like whether he _should_ officially shoot down Iron Man—filtered away. It felt good to create, to take blankness and make it _something_.

He flipped to a fresh sheet. He didn’t look around for reference this time; he just drew, characters appearing on the page like old friends. Tarzan of the Apes. Popeye the Sailor. Buck Rogers, time-displaced war hero. (That was a weird one, in retrospect.) How many hours had he spent painstakingly recreating the heroes of the comics page until he could get them just right?

Before the war, he’d had a half-formed idea of becoming an artist for one of the new “superhero” strips, drawing the daring exploits of Mandrake the Magician or the Phantom. Everything about Steve’s life ran counter to the usual story—instead of channeling larger-than-life dreams into fiction, his plans of vicarious derring-do were superseded by becoming a superhero. For a little bit, during the USO days, fiction and reality overlapped in a particularly strange way: he’d drawn himself actually being the hero he dressed up as, storyboarding panels of Captain America punching Hitler in the face.

He flipped to another page and drew himself. Fighting Red Skull. Ziplining onto a train with Bucky. Meeting Thor in a clash of hammer on shield. He drew Black Widow, flipping off his shield to take out a Chitauri; a Hammer Drone facing off against the Falcon; Hawkeye catching a ride on Hulk’s shoulder. He drew himself falling from the sky, and then he drew Iron Man flying in to catch him.

Just past midnight, the National Air and Space Museum came alive.

Every light in the building had been turned on, as though by a kid left home alone for the first time getting scared as the dark crept in. Every _thing_ in the building had been turned on. The control panel of the Apollo 11 Command Module was lit up and blinking. SpaceShipOne hummed ominously. Even the _Spirit of Saint Louis_ ’s propeller was spinning.

Steve kept his shield up and his eyes peeled for sudden movement. Just like at the lab in Maryland, there was no need to guess where he was going. That time he’d known the song but not the singer; this time it was the other way around. _Fly me to the moon_ , Sinatra crooned. _Let me play among the stars_.

Iron Man stood in the middle of the planetarium, surrounded by stars. Holographic spheres of light formed constellations that spun around him in a grand _ballet blanc_ , filling the room with shimmering luminescence. Iron Man was not merely the locus of their orbit, Steve realized, but their progenitor. Iron Man as both sun and nebula, the entire Milky Way radiating out of his armor.

“So are you finally gonna show me your place on the moon?”

Iron Man turned. The stars rushed away; Steve had to resist the instinct to bring up his shield as they hurtled toward the edges of the room, disappearing when they hit the wall. A handful of stars blew up to the size of balloons. One of them was the Sun, Steve guessed, the others Sirius and Alpha Centauri and the rest of the solar neighborhood.

“First I thought we could see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. Spoiler alert: stormy and dusty, respectively.”

Steve dropped into a chair, tilting his head back to take in the celestial waltz. “How about Venus?”

“Don’t tease me.” The holographic stars blinked out, replaced by a series of lasers forming a giant prism. “Has anyone made you listen to _The Dark Side of the Moon_ yet?” A white laser pierced the prism to create a rainbow.

“You gonna give me a private show?”

“Would it be private? Where are your friends?”

“You mean the other Avengers? They’re at the Post Office.”

“And yet when I want to mail a package at two o’clock on a Wednesday, they always seem to be closed.”

Steve kicked his feet up on the seat in front of him. “Who knew the Post Office had a law enforcement arm? Or that their law enforcement arm had a crime lab? Or that any of their cases would be of such interest to a supervillain that he’d seize control of a museum on the National Mall just to distract from the raid he was simultaneously carrying out on that crime lab?”

“If you’re trying to get me to break, let me point out that I have an excellent poker face. And not to immediately undercut myself, but what makes you assume _this_ is the distraction? It could be the other way around. Maybe I lured your teammates out to Dulles to give us privacy while I reveal my evil plan.”

A holographic Earth and moon replaced the prism. The moon fired a laser into the earth, blasting it into pieces. Holographic space dust blew toward Steve like a cloud of flies. He swatted the air ineffectually.

“Your evil plan is to become a projector for 3D showings of _A New Hope_?”

“Damn. I was hoping you hadn’t seen it. This is the problem, I never know what touchstones you’re familiar with.”

“I wasn’t knocking your plan, for the record. I’d love to see you turn your talents to making an honest living. The planetarium would be lucky to have you.”

“They sure as hell would.” Iron Man slapped a hand on the planetarium’s star projector. “This old machine was a stunner back in its day, but its day is pretty far back.”

“You’re not secretly talking about me, are you?” Between Tony Stark’s commentary on modern art and Sam’s oblique attack on his social life, Steve had been made wary.

Iron Man ignored him. “You know, Zeiss—German company—first started cranking these bad boys out in the twenties. They wanted to get one in America’s hot little hands, but we didn’t have anywhere to put it. Time passed, things happened, Zeiss used _eine kleine_ forced labor in its factories, the Allies split Germany like an atom… We finally got this beauty from the West German government in the seventies. Such a thoughtful gift, right? I mean, we did give them a wish list. Really primo diplomatic language, made sure to clarify that of course they didn’t _have_ to get us anything, we’d be happy if they just came to the party, but just as an FYI, France gave us this big-ass statue for our _last_ birthday, so… What’s happening here?”

Steve had gotten up from his seat to come down the aisle. “I’ve been trying to figure you out,” he said, stopping a few yards away.

“And?” Iron Man said. “Any conclusions yet?”

Steve shrugged. “Big on the talk, not so big on the action.”

Iron Man scoffed. “Excuse you: drones at Hammer’s party, battle tank in Hong Kong—”

“I wasn’t talking about your villainy.”

Iron Man stared at him. Steve looked steadily back. He may not have had Iron Man’s poker face, but damn if he would be first to blink.

“Shit,” Iron Man said, suddenly unfreezing. “Lights to, fuck, negative 1000%.”

The room went black. Even the exit sign turned off. The only sources of light were Iron Man’s glowing eyes. This was the setup for a horror movie, but it wasn’t fear speeding Steve’s heart as the eyes came closer.

They stopped inches away. Iron Man wasn’t touching him, but Steve could _feel_ him all the same, like static electricity. A soft mechanical _whirr_ as the faceplate retreated. Steve didn’t know if it was tension or the now-absolute darkness amplifying his other senses—more likely it was neither, just his imagination working overtime—but he thought he could hear Iron Man’s heart beating, a rhythm syncopated to his own.

Hot breath ghosted across his lips. When had Steve closed his eyes? He should open them. His night vision was excellent; his eyes might be able to adjust to the darkness. Then he’d be able to see the shape of the nose bumping against his, maybe even make out…

Iron Man’s lips brushed against his, so faint Steve wasn’t sure he hadn’t imagined it. A second time, a little surer. Iron Man had a _beard_. For some reason this realization punched the breath out of Steve, an exhalation interrupted by Iron Man’s mouth on his.

Iron Man was kissing him, and it was so different than Steve ever would have imagined it, slow and soft and sweet. Iron Man captured his lower lip, sucking gently. He pulled away only to come right back, claiming the upper lip this time. Steve kissed back, nudging against Iron Man’s face to feel the scratchy rasp of his beard.

Frank Sinatra was singing the first verse again; Iron Man must have put the song on repeat. _In other words, baby, kiss me_. Steve wanted to ask if Iron Man spent more time picking out songs to accompany his villainous undertakings than he did planning the actual villainy, but then he would have had to stop kissing Iron Man. There were so many ways their mouths fit together, each better than the last. Iron Man’s tongue swept across his lips. Steve scraped his teeth over—

“Captain?” Natasha said loud in Steve’s ear. He bit down, startled.

Iron Man hissed in pain. “Sorry!” Steve said quickly. Blind, unthinking, he reached out to soothe the offended lip with his thumb. Iron Man’s breath was hot and fast, his mouth soft and wet. He nipped Steve’s thumb as though in retribution, then licked it as though to accept his apology. Steve’s brain short-circuited. “Um.”

Natasha had said something else, possibly several things, that Steve missed entirely. “What’s your status?” he finally heard.

He cleared his throat, stepping away and putting his finger to his ear. (His thumb felt cold.) “Still at NASM,” he said, hearing the _whirr_ of the faceplate reengaging behind him. “I’m going to do a quick sweep of the building before we let the team in to disable all the electronics.”

He wasn’t surprised when he turned around and found Iron Man gone. The music had stopped, too, and the footlights and exit sign were back on.

When Steve emerged into the hall, he found that the team might not have much to disable— _Columbia_ was dark, SpaceShipOne silent, _Spirit_ perfectly still. If Steve’s hearing hadn’t been as excellent as his night vision, he might have missed the evidence that at least one exhibit was still running. He followed the sound of recorded voices to a display of V-2 ballistic missiles.

“Between 1945 and 1959,” the woman in the video was saying, “more than sixteen hundred German scientists, many of them former high-ranking members of the Nazi party, were given ‘safe haven’ in the United States as part of ‘Operation Paperclip.’ These scientists included men like Hubertus Strughold, linked to human experimentation during the Holocaust, and Arnim Zola, a key advisor to SS General Johann Schmidt…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this week's reading question: when Tony got home, do you think he a) screamed into his pillow, b) drafted a letter resigning as an advisor to SHIELD, then deleted it, then drafted a letter resigning as Iron Man, then deleted it, then drafted a letter resigning as Tony Stark, then deleted it, c) jacked off furiously in the shower, or d) all of the above? discuss among yourselves in the comments
> 
> BUT MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY: the incredible, stellar, utterly fantastic [arthur_pendragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthur_pendragon/pseuds/arthur_pendragon) made a [COVER](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24228526) for this fic, and it's genuinely the most beautiful perfect gorgeous thing I've ever seen in my life, so go check it out/leave kudos/shower praise/etc. I'm so so grateful to all of you for reading & engaging & generally going on this silly ride with me, and the fact that people are enjoying this fic enough to leave comments about things that happened in the chapter or, y'know, making _freaking gorgeous cover art_ is really sending me. ♥ ♥ ♥


	6. the dark side of the moon

Some small, dark part of Steve envied the Hulk. To be able to channel all your anger into a creature of pure rage—there had to be something freeing in that. A literal separation of the id. He wouldn’t have to think. He wouldn’t be responsible for any destruction he caused in his wrath. It would be out of his control.

_God_ , it would be a relief to not be in control.

He knew, of course, how misplaced his envy was. Bruce _did_ feel responsible for the Hulk’s actions, that was the whole problem, and if Steve were in his place he would feel the same. So he would never tell Bruce about that small, dark part of him, but maybe he would ask for tips on managing rage, because he needed _something_.

It wasn’t just Operation Paperclip that had stoked Steve’s temper into simmering fury, though his reading on that subject provided plenty of fuel. He’d returned from the museum to find hundreds of megabytes of new files on his phone, top secret SHIELD documents referring to “Phase 2” and “Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S.” and “Project Insight.” The files’ contents were bad enough, but worse was knowing that they represented only the tip of the proverbial iceberg: each document implied the existence of so many more—so many secrets, so many lies—lurking beneath the water. All these things hidden from Steve by the organization that kept insisting it had been founded in his honor.

In the absence of either Bruce’s affliction or his advice, Steve turned to the literalist method of “working out” aggression. There was no DC equivalent to Gleason’s in Brooklyn, an old-school boxing gym that had been around nearly as long as Steve had. The Triskelion, of course, boasted the most state-of-the-art exercise equipment imaginable, but despite what Sam thought, Steve had tried to carve out some measure of existence outside of SHIELD. “Tried” being the operative word; SHIELD had tried to stop him. They’d compromised with this: a building near Steve’s apartment that SHIELD bought and turned into a private gym with a membership of one. Steve wasn’t fool enough to think this compromise gave him real privacy, but he knew how to pick his battles.

Steve was only a few minutes into his workout when _Kiss_ by Prince came on. He knew for a fact that he hadn’t had the song in his library before going to the planetarium.

The planetarium, where he and Iron Man had kissed. Where they had done a lot _more_ than kiss in Steve’s dream the other night. Snatches of vivid detail returned to him now: tossing a holographic model of Venus around like a volleyball, Frank Sinatra showing up to offer sex tips, Iron Man somehow managing to go down on Steve without removing his faceplate.

The music was ostensibly on shuffle, yet _Kiss_ played nineteen times in three hours. It was a good workout, if not particularly effective as catharsis. Maybe he would have had better luck exorcising his anger if he hadn’t kept swinging wildly between frustration with SHIELD and Fury and America and the world in general and frustration of another nature altogether. (How the hell had this Prince fella gotten away with sounding so _damn turned on_ in his music, anyway? Steve didn’t like to think of himself as a prude, but _God_ , had decency gone out the window? And was _this_ Iron Man’s real evil plan, driving Steve certifiably out of his mind with nothing but dirty pop songs?)

Steve turned to get a fresh punching bag and found Natasha sitting on the pile. “You’ve been ignoring my texts,” she said.

He grabbed the bag she was using as a footrest and hung it up without answering. She wasn’t the one he was angry with, he didn’t want to take it out on her—except to the extent that she was, and he did.

She didn’t say anything as he started punching the new bag, not even when he destroyed it in only three hits. He got as far as hanging up a replacement before he could no longer take her silence and her cool, dispassionate gaze. “How do you stand it?” he asked. “Keeping Fury’s secrets, telling his lies. Knowing that he’s got more secrets he’s not telling you, more lies that he _is_.”

Natasha shrugged. “I come at things with very different expectations than you do. I never expect anyone to tell the truth. I don’t expect governments to do nice things. When all you expect from the world is more shittiness, you never find yourself disappointed.”

Steve scoffed. “That’s bleak.”

“I consider myself an optimist.” Steve snorted. Natasha smiled. “I mean it. Growing up, I thought the world was one hundred percent pure shit. All people were inherently selfish. If the universe could find a way to screw you over, it would.”

“One hundred percent?” Steve repeated. “You’re telling me you never had _one_ nice encounter. Never met a giggling baby, or saw a beautiful sunset, or witnessed someone helping a little old lady cross the street. Never watched a goddamn cute cat video.”

“The innocence and purity of children is a myth,” Natasha said. “Started by the Victorians, disproven in countless studies. The beauty of a sunset has no moral valence. People can do kind things for selfish reasons. And a kitten is not a kindness.”

“A kind thing done for a selfish reason is still a kind thing,” Steve said, responding to the only point he had an answer for.

Natasha shrugged. “True. You didn’t let me finish. It’s like…you know that argument about whether the glass is half full or half empty? All my life I thought that was crazy. There was no water in the glass. None.

“And then one day I realized there was. Not a lot of it—anyone who thinks it’s half-anything is seriously deluded—but still. There was _water_ in the _glass_. All this time I’d thought it was empty. When all you’ve ever seen is a world where everything’s one hundred percent pure shit, finding out that it’s actually only ninety-nine percent shit is incredible news. That one percent of not-shit looks miraculous.”

“So what are you saying? I should lower my expectations?”

“No. We can’t really manage our expectations. You can’t force yourself to believe in something you don’t already believe in, it’s paradoxical. You asked how I do it, and I’m telling you. I always knew I’d spend my life working in the shit, but now I do it in the service of that one percent of goodness. Those few drops of water at the bottom of the glass.”

“You’re saying you work in a sewage treatment plant,” Steve deadpanned. Natasha laughed.

“You’re part of that one percent, Steve,” she said. “Honestly, you might be _most_ of it. But if you’re gonna exist in the world, you need to reconcile with the other ninety-nine percent. I don’t mean you have to accept it—you wouldn’t be you if you did—but you can’t keep being surprised every time the world doesn’t live up to your sepia-tinged vision. You have to decide what compromises you’re willing to make in service of the greater good.”

Steve had thought that’s what he _was_ doing. And he hadn’t thought he had “sepia-toned vision,” but maybe he did—if he hadn’t been expecting better, how could learning about Fury’s secret projects make him feel so betrayed? You couldn’t have betrayal without trust. You couldn’t be outraged by something you’d seen coming. You didn’t get very mad about injustice when you hadn’t expected justice in the first place.

That damn song was on again. Prince got to the part of the bridge where he sounded like he was having an orgasm, and Steve’s fist punctured the punching bag.

“I assume this is a bad time to reiterate my suggestion that you get laid,” Natasha said.

Steve went to get a new punching bag, but there weren’t any. He’d blown through a week’s supply in one session. And he still felt jumpy, unsettled, simmering with multiple kinds of frustration.

“Actually,” he said, unwrapping his knuckles, “you might have a point.”

“Is this gonna be our version of the Bat-Signal? You climb the nearest phallic structure and I meet you there? ‘Cause I don’t hate it.”

Steve didn’t turn around. He hadn’t, as a matter of fact, come to the observation deck of the Washington Monument in the hope that Iron Man would meet him there—but if he was honest with himself, he was neither surprised nor displeased that it had happened. He sat with that knowledge for a moment, letting it sink into his bones. The sun had just set beyond the Lincoln Memorial, at least in theory; it had been overcast and raining all day. Clusters of umbrellas bobbed around the World War II Memorial.

“My dad used to tell me this thing was a missile silo,” Iron Man said. “I thought that whenever America bombed another country, it meant the president had pushed a button to made the top pop off so the rockets could fly out.”

“I got your message,” Steve said.

“Please tell me I didn’t drunk-dial you. I have a hazy memory of moaning your name in the middle of the night, but I think that was just a really good dream.”

“The Nazi scientist stuff. Arnim Zola getting recruited for SHIELD.”

“Zola, right, that little gremlin. You had some run-ins with him, didn’t you? During the war?”

“Bucky—” Steve stopped, cleared his throat. “My best friend died on the mission to take him into custody.”

“Let’s give SHIELD the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just interpreted their ‘mission to protect’ way too broadly.” Iron Man paused. “I take it that whatever episode of _Schoolhouse Rock_ they screened to catch you up didn’t mention Operation Paperclip.”

Steve huffed a short laugh. “No.”

“I’d ask whether they mentioned any of the other stuff, but I think I can guess by the way you’re squeezing that railing.”

Steve looked down. His grip had made indentations in the metal. “I don’t like being kept in the dark. Actually—that’s not what bothers me. I’ve _been_ top secret. I can respect need-to-know. But don’t keep me in the dark and tell me the lights are on. Don’t lie out of one side of your face and swear you’re being honest with the other.”

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining?” Iron Man suggested.

Steve finally turned to face him. The cherry red and gleaming gold of Iron Man’s armor popped against the Monument’s dull grey interior. “I was recently reminded that people can do good things for selfish reasons.”

“Sure. They can even do bad things for selfless reasons. It’s a veritable Punnett square of moral alignments.”

“So where do you fit in?”

“Selfish,” Iron Man answered immediately. “Bad and selfish, all the way down.”

Steve took a step forward, putting himself right in Iron Man’s space. “I don’t believe you.”

Iron Man was silent for a moment. Then: “Close your eyes.”

Steve stared. Iron Man’s face, of course, gave nothing away.

Nothing was as it should be. One of SSR’s top targets had become one of SHIELD’s top advisors. A few months ago, Steve had handed his phone over to SHIELD in concern that Iron Man might have hacked it; now Iron Man had handed him proof that he’d hacked deeper into SHIELD’s operations than Steve had known them to extend. SHIELD kept lying to him, even as they insisted he trust them. Iron Man kept pointing him toward the truth, even as he insisted Steve _not_ trust him.

The thing about trust was that it cut both ways, regardless of who was asking. If Steve closed his eyes, he would be trusting Iron Man not to fire a plasma beam into his skull, or launch a missile at the White House, or take off his helmet to reveal he’d been the Red Skull this entire time. But Iron Man would be trusting Steve, too. Trusting him not to look.

Iron Man wanted to keep Steve in the dark much more literally than SHIELD did. But he wasn’t just doing it. He was _asking_.

Steve had won their last staring contest. He could afford to forfeit this one.

He closed his eyes.

Iron Man’s mouth was on his in less than a heartbeat. Even if Steve had been tempted to peek, he wouldn’t get a particularly clear image at this distance—and who needed sight, anyway, when he had touch and taste?

This kiss was nothing like the one the other night. If that had been soft and exploratory, this was hard and proprietary. Iron Man kissed him like the end of the world was one minute away. Gauntleted hands grasped his head, holding him firmly in place and at the mercy of Iron Man’s lips and tongue and _teeth_. It was exactly what Steve needed right now, this roughness. He groaned, and Iron Man took the opportunity to push his tongue inside Steve’s mouth. The kiss turned wilder, messier, more urgent. More than a minute had passed, but the world was still ending where their mouths pressed together.

Iron Man’s leg was wedged between Steve’s, and Steve was _hard_ , his dick pressed up against all that firm, unyielding metal. Hands gripped his ass. Desperate little noises escaped Steve’s throat as Iron Man _kneaded_ , encouraging. He couldn’t help grinding down, seeking friction.

Distantly, Steve wondered if this was moving too fast. The first time they’d kissed had been remarkably chaste, despite what his dreams later tried to tell him. This was only the second, and Steve was _humping Iron Man’s leg_.

Then again: he was kissing a _supervillain_. Iron Man’s tongue was fucking into Steve’s mouth, and Steve didn’t even know what the man _looked_ like. Moving too fast was surely no higher than eight or nine on the long list of things that he should be concerned about. Based on the way Iron Man seemed to be trying to haul him in even closer, despite the practical impossibility, _he_ wasn’t concerned.

_Screw it_ , Steve thought. He broke the kiss, keeping his eyes closed, and pressed his forehead against Iron Man’s. Iron Man squeezed his ass in reply. “How’d things go in the lab?” Steve asked, voice coming out husky without him meaning it to.

Iron Man made an indecipherable noise and pulled him in for a brutal, bruising kiss. Then he pushed him away. Steve stumbled back, eyes opening in surprise just in time to see the headplate snap back into place.

“Take it off,” Iron Man said. “All of it.”

Steve hesitated only a fraction of a second before his hands went to his belt.

Part of him wished for more— _any_ —expressiveness on Iron Man’s part, but part of him almost enjoyed the impassivity of the armor, how his countenance remained the same whether he was shooting off lasers, making questionable innuendos, or watching Steve strip. There was something undeniably titillating about not being able to glean Iron Man’s reaction even as Steve stood stark naked in front of him.

Stark naked and hard.

Stark naked and hard at the top of the Washington Monument.

Okay, _some_ reaction might be nice.

“Jesus, _stop_. Not you,” Iron Man said, just as alarm bells of self-consciousness started ringing in Steve’s brain. “The suit. It keeps giving me alerts that I’m in danger of ‘loss of consciousness due to hyperventilation-induced alkalosis,’ whatever _that_ means.”

“Are you?” Steve asked, gratified but also concerned. This situation would get awkward quick if Iron Man passed out on him.

“Nope, not anymore. Recycled air, better than a paper bag.” Iron Man tapped the side of his head. He looked Steve up and down, and this time Steve picked up on the catch in his breath, the rise and fall of armored chest. “Turn around.”

Steve did. How convenient that this railing already had grooves perfectly fit to his hands.

“I’m not still dreaming, am I?” Iron Man said. “Pinch me. No, that won’t work, the armor. Can I pinch you?”

“How would that help?”

“Dunno, you might like it.” Iron Man slid a hand over Steve’s bare ass. Steve shivered at the cool touch. “Too cold?”

“No.”

“You sure? I can turn the heat on.” Iron Man placed his other hand on Steve’s other ass cheek to demonstrate. One side quickly became toasty warm while the other stayed the same, like Steve was sitting in a car with a broken seat warmer.

Steve turned his head. “You think of everything, don’t you?”

“I take my engineering seriously,” Iron Man said, sliding his fingers into Steve’s mouth. “Complete thermal control, one hundred percent smooth edges, auto-lube system. Which is why there’s no actual need for you to suck my fingers—yeah, baby, just like that—but I figure hey, what’s the harm?” Steve could think of a couple different comebacks to _that_ , but then he would have had to stop tonguing the ridges of Iron Man’s fingers. Christ, they were _ribbed_. And the guy claimed his armor hadn’t initially been designed for sex?

Steve sucked in when he felt Iron Man pulling away, so the fingers came out with an audible _pop_ , glistening with saliva. “Jesus, that’s hot,” Iron Man said, sounding awed. Steve echoed the sentiment—albeit not with intelligible words—as Iron Man spread his ass cheeks, dragging wet fingers down the length of Steve’s cleft.

“There’s still time to say uncle,” Iron Man said, rubbing gentle circles around his entrance. Steve felt the slick of the auto-lube system engaging. “Unless—do you usually call out for Uncle Sam when you climax? We might need a different safe word.”

“I’m not gonna dignify that with a— _nngh_.” All thoughts of dignity fled from Steve’s mind as Iron Man pushed his finger in up to the first articulated knuckle.

Iron Man chuckled low. “Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Steve let out a shaky breath, forcing himself to relax. “Yeah,” he said again, shifting slightly. “Better than okay. Keep going.”

What an idiot he’d been, thinking that turning into a giant green monster was the best imaginable outlet for too-intense feelings. Why had he wasted time punching things? He should have gone straight for this. Iron Man pushed in all the way to the last knuckle, then pulled agonizingly—good-agonizingly—back out. He repeated the motion until it was less drag and more slide, and then he curled his finger and hit a spot that made Steve gasp.

“Yeah,” he said, bucking back—mirroring Iron Man’s rhythm, trying to get him in deeper. “Yeah, that.”

Iron Man pressed a kiss to Steve’s shoulder as he added a second finger. Steve dropped his head onto the ledge, groaning, half because of the addition and half because that kiss meant Iron Man had lifted the faceplate again. He was _right there_ , right behind him, probably watching his own fingers fuck into Steve’s ass.

Steve wanted to look. He wanted to see the face behind the faceplate, the man trailing kisses over his neck as he worked him open. Steve squeezed his eyes shut, focusing instead on sensation: stretch and pressure, full and empty. It felt so _good_ —good enough to make him stop worrying about anything else.

He barely had time to mourn the absence of Iron Man’s fingers before he was being spun roughly around, trapped between a rock and a hard place. Literally: the rock wall of the Monument and the hardness of Iron Man’s fully-articulated red-and-gold metal dick.

“Wow,” Steve said, taking in its impressive length and girth. He looked up at Iron Man’s glowing eyes. “You didn’t exactly stint, did you?”

Iron Man shrugged. “When you’re converting a billion-dollar weapon into a high-tech sex toy, you want to go all out. I figured you could take it.”

“So give it to me,” Steve said, thoroughly intending to be as corny as Iron Man usually was with his come-ons. Either Iron Man was genuinely turned on by corniness or everything else about the situation made up for it, because he wasted no time in grabbing the back of Steve’s thighs and lifting him entirely off the ground.

Steve blinked, startled—then grinned, wrapping his legs around Iron Man’s waist. This wasn’t the position he’d been anticipating, but to say he didn’t mind would be putting it lightly. It was a good contrast: Steve all naked flesh, Iron Man all hard steel alloy.

Also, reasoned the responsible part of Steve from wherever it was conveniently hiding, this way he wouldn’t further mangle the railing.

“Slight problem,” Iron Man said. “I can’t actually feel with it, and my hands are kind of full.” He helpfully demonstrated the second point by squeezing Steve’s ass. (Steve didn’t want to jump to any conclusions, but he was starting to suspect Iron Man might have a thing for his ass.)

“I got it.” The muscles in Steve’s thighs trembled as he positioned Iron Man’s metal dick against his entrance. He bit his lip and sank down the first few inches.

“You know what to do from here, right?”

Iron Man growled. He pulled out so just the bulbous head of the dick was stretching Steve’s hole, then slammed all the way home. “I’ll take that as a yes,” Steve said, shaky voiced. Was he seeing stars due to the way Iron Man was ramming over and over into his prostrate, or had the celestial holograms come back on?

Steve’s own cock was smearing precome onto the suit. He took it in hand, jacking himself in time with Iron Man’s thrusts. It wouldn’t take long. He was close already.

“God, look at you,” Iron Man said, pounding into him with enough force to shake the walls. The Washington Monument had been closed since an earthquake a year and a half earlier; hopefully the repair crew wouldn’t notice a few extra cracks in the masonry. “You’re so—fucking— _good_.”

He punctuated the last word with a thrust that penetrated deeper than any before. At the same moment, Steve’s hand tightened around his cock on a particularly powerful upstroke. He came hard. His vision whited out; he might have shouted. _This_ was what it felt like to lose control, just as he’d been needing, and it _kept_ _going_ , the longest orgasm he’d ever had, Iron Man fucking him through the whole thing, only easing out once Steve had gone all but limp, completely spent.

Steve didn’t quite trust his legs to support him—well, he _did_ , super soldier serum and all that, but it would be nicer not to ask them to just yet. He let the railing support most of his weight instead.

“Am I crazy, or does that look like…” Iron Man was looking down at himself. Steve’s semen had painted a kind of…lopsided white star across his chest.

Steve snorted. He couldn’t help it. He _laughed_. Iron Man looked at him, but there was no way to tell whether he was trying to convey a glare or incredulity or something else entirely. “Doesn’t look half-bad,” Steve said, grinning. “You need something to break up all that red.”

“I’ll take that into consideration for Mark 7. Based on your feedback”—Iron Man indicated the jizz dripping down his torso, catching in the chinks of his armor; Steve felt his ears pink despite himself—“I think we can call this beta test of Mark 6.9 a success.”

“What did alpha testing look like?”

“If you’re asking whether I fucked myself with my own armor, the answer is obviously yes.”

That was exactly what Steve had been wondering, though not in such explicit terms. Now that it had been put in those terms, the image it elicited, incomplete as it was, stirred something in his gut despite the fact that he’d come all of thirty seconds ago. “You really do take your engineering seriously,” he said, keeping his voice steady through deliberate effort.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of death.” To Steve’s raised eyebrows, Iron Man said, “There was a slight soldering mishap during construction. I’m usually great with lab safety—not so much the precautions, but being too expert to make mistakes—but I got distracted when I thought of the word ‘ad _dick_ tion.’ Like ‘addition,’ as in I’m making this addition to the suit, but with ‘dick.’ I was trying to decide whether sounding functionally identical to ‘addiction’ added to or subtracted from its brilliance. ‘I’m addicted to your addickton’—that could be a thing you said.”

He looked at Steve expectantly. Steve looked back.

“…Anyway, wound up with a big old burn, and you never know, if it had gotten infected…” Iron Man had indicated his right forearm as the location of the burn, but of course there was nothing to see but sleek metal.

“Are you taking care of it?” Steve asked.

“Yes, Captain.” He sensed that Iron Man was rolling his eyes. “All bandaged up. You’re worse than the suit.”

The thought of Iron Man’s human arm beneath the armor reminded Steve of something else that probably needed attention. His discarded clothes provided handy cushioning when he dropped to his knees. “Does this come off?” he asked, running his hands experimentally over the armor’s codpiece, around the addicktion.

“You mean—yes. _God_ yes.”

A series of clicking noises, and Steve was able to lift the entire section of armor away, revealing Iron Man’s cock. His _real_ cock, the first visible piece of human skin Steve had seen of him.

Steve had never actually given a blowjob before, but they hadn’t called him the most intrepid man under General Eisenhower’s command for nothing. If he could prove himself worthy of becoming the first in a new breed of super soldiers with nothing but a can-do attitude and a willingness to learn, surely he could manage this.

“Tell me if I’m doing it wrong,” he said, and wrapped his mouth around the head.

Based on the strangled noise that filtered out of Iron Man’s helmet, Steve assumed he was doing fine so far. Iron Man’s fingers flexed against Steve’s head like he was trying to find purchase in his hair but was impeded by the suit. He moved his hands to rest lightly on Steve’s shoulders instead.

Steve, meanwhile, licked up the underside of the shaft, enjoying the way he could _feel_ the pulse of blood pumping through Iron Man’s body. He swirled his tongue over the slit, smearing precome, then engulfed the cockhead again. He found a rhythm, taking it little further each time.

Iron Man seemed tense. His hips jerked when the tip of his cock hit the back of Steve’s throat, then immediately stilled. Steve could feel him trembling with the effort not to move.

He pulled off. “I’m a super soldier, remember. You don’t have to hold back.”

Iron Man stared at him. “Are you _sure_ I’m not dreaming?”

Steve smirked. He lightly pinched the inside of Iron Man’s thigh.

“Okay, strong argument. I— _mmrpgh_.” Whatever Iron Man had been about to say got lost as Steve swallowed him down to the base.

Steve grabbed Iron Man’s hand and guided it to his neck. Then he sat back on his heels.

“You— _Jesus_.” Iron Man rocked tentatively forward, his grip firming on the back of Steve’s neck. Steve hummed approvingly. His hands were in his lap, which was convenient, given that he was getting hard again. Why not confirm Iron Man’s hypothesis about his refractory period? He stroked himself, letting Iron Man fuck into his mouth, hitting the back of his throat with every thrust.

“God—Steve—” Even through the voice-modulating effect of the armor, Iron Man sounded _wrecked_. “Close your eyes, please,” he begged.

Steve obeyed without hesitation. He heard the _whirr_ of the faceplate lifting, harsh breathing unmediated by the suit. Iron Man’s thrusts grew faster, frantic. He squeezed Steve’s shoulder, a warning Steve ignored.

Hot semen filled his mouth. Steve didn’t know if his easy control over his gag reflex was an unexpected blessing of the serum or something he’d always had—he’d never had occasion to test it, before—but he was grateful for it now as Iron Man’s taste coated his tongue and throat. Steve followed over the edge a moment later, coming at the thought of swallowing Iron Man down, every last drop. He heard a completely human voice mutter a faint “ _fuck_ ,” but he was too far gone in pleasure to analyze it.

Steve kept his eyes closed even after Iron Man pulled out—though it occurred to him that for someone so intent on keeping his identity a secret, Iron Man had just given him a load (no pun intended) of potentially identifiable organic material. Fury’s poker face was almost as good as Iron Man’s, but Steve wondered how well it would hold up if he were to walk into SHIELD, spit into a vial, and instruct a technician to run a DNA test on it to determine Iron Man’s identity.

He heard the faceplate reengage and opened his eyes. Iron Man’s eyes were lit up, as always, but his expression read almost blank. He was swaying ever so slightly, like—well, like the Washington Monument had done a few minutes earlier.

Steve peered at him. “You’re not hyperventilating again, are you? Not gonna pass out on me?”

Iron Man thunked his head against the wall behind him. “Evil. You’re _evil_.” He sounded half-resigned, half-awed. “Which one of us is supposed to be the villain here?”

Steve smiled, crooked. “Good question.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Iron Dildo—in the end, I just couldn't resist.
> 
> Full points to everyone who answered d) on last chapter's reading question. Tony might have found that he pulled the trigger on Melodrama too soon, now that he's got all _this_ to react to. Full points to anyone who comments literally anything on this chapter—I'm feeling generous, and also the points mean nothing. 😘


	7. satisfaction feels like a distant memory

Steve had been in the twenty-first century for more than a year, and in that time he’d made a lot of adjustments. He’d changed his look—shorter hair, pants that slung lower on his hips, shirts that clung tighter to his chest. (Though Natasha recently told him that high-waisted pants and undercuts were coming back in style, which just figured.) SHIELD had set him up with apartments in two different cities, a private gym, a motorcycle. He’d gone to a _basketball_ game. By almost all outward appearances, he had been fully made over into a modern American man.

Yet somehow, he didn’t own a suit.

“No one dresses up to go to the theater anymore anyway,” Sam said.

“You sure about that?” It had only taken a couple weeks of post-ice living for Steve to learn not to trust casual generalizations about things everybody/nobody did/said/wore/ate/thought/knew nowadays/anymore. Too often “everybody” turned out to mean one very specific demographic that did not include Steve.

“I guess _some_ people do,” Sam said, proving Steve’s point. “Old people, rich people, old rich people. You wouldn’t look out of place wearing a suit to the ballet, but you won’t look out of place in a jeans and t-shirt, either.”

“I’m gonna be there with Tony Stark,” Steve said. “And Pepper, his assistant.”

“Okay, that’s tricky. With Tony Stark you never know. He’ll either be wearing white tie or sweatpants, no in between. What’d you wear to Hammer’s party, again?”

“Dress uniform.”

“Right, of course.” Sam smacked his forehead. “How could I forget? That article crashed Buzzfeed for hours.”

“Two more strikes and you’re out of the fan club,” Steve said, straight-faced.

“They can’t kick me out, I just got elected treasurer. What’s wrong with your dress uniform?”

“Besides the fact that it’s a literal museum piece?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

Steve couldn’t answer. He would have had to admit that the sight of his dress uniform now reminded him of Iron Man’s baldly stated desire to fuck him in it—and while that had been one thing when it was no more than an idle threat, after what had gone down (no pun intended—God, when had he gotten such a dirty mind? That Prince song had really scrambled his brain) less than twenty-four hours earlier in the Washington Monument, neither “threat” nor “idle” remained an accurate descriptor. “Promise” and “mouth-watering,” maybe. Which made Steve reluctant to wear the uniform anywhere an inadvertent erection might be inappropriate, which was to say pretty much everywhere.

“Dude, wear the uniform,” Sam said when Steve’s silence had stretched to a conspicuous length. “Not having to think about what to wear to weddings anymore was my main reason for joining the military.”

“When you say things like that, sometimes I worry you aren’t kidding,” Steve informed him. But he grabbed the uniform. There wasn’t time to procure a suit, and his mom had drilled into him that it was better to be overdressed than underdressed. He’d be fine as long as he didn’t allow his thoughts to drift to Iron Man. He’d just focus on enjoying Tony Stark’s company.

Despite the fact that he’d forgotten about agreeing to see _Giselle_ before waking up to a call from some sort of robotic butler inquiring whether he needed a ride, Steve made it to the Met fifteen minutes before curtain. Pepper was already there, but Tony was not. “I guess he’s like his dad, huh?”

“In what way?” Pepper asked.

“Punctual. Howard was always on time—never late, and definitely never early. If he was supposed to meet you at seven, he’d be there one second before seven-oh-one. The guys made a big joke of it—on New Year’s, everyone blew their noisemakers fifty-nine seconds after midnight.” The memory made him smile. Sixty-eight New Year’s Eves had passed since then; Steve had been awake for two of them, yet that night still felt like it had taken place less than a year and a half ago. That disconnect would probably always bother him to some extent, but he’d gotten used to it.

“That’s not Tony, unfortunately,” Pepper said. “He was once five hours late to my birthday party. Which was particularly impressive given that it was at his house, and he was home. Don’t worry, I told Happy eight o’clock.”

“Is Happy his AI?”

“His driver. It’s not that Tony forgets appointments as much as he doesn’t commit them to memory in the first place. When you’re rich enough to hire people to remember things for you, and smart enough to build machines to do the same thing… Anyway, Tony knows the drill. He’ll get in the car when Happy tells him to, even if he doesn’t know what for. He should have it figured out by the lobby.”

It sounded like kind of an awful way to live, but maybe Steve was projecting. He had always chafed at people telling him what to do—ironic, given his reputation as history’s greatest soldier, but no less true for it. It was a contradiction inherent to the military chain of command that authority and obedience went hand in hand; if you wanted to be a leader, you had to prove yourself as a follower. Steve had always been better at the former than the latter. He guessed the difference between SHIELD treating him like an eternal child—telling him he had to be at X location at Y o’clock to do Z, and he’d better not argue—and Pepper/Happy/a robot butler doing the same to Tony Stark was that Tony had agreed to be at X location at Y o’clock to do Z in the first place, whether or not he bothered to remember it.

Tony showed up wearing a well-tailored navy blue suit, a dress shirt with the top couple buttons undone, and no tie. (A collar pin stuck through one of the points indicated that he’d been wearing a tie at some point—and given that the pin looked to be encrusted with actual rubies, Sam might not have been that far off when he’d guessed Tony would come in white tie.) He was already talking as he took his seat on Pepper’s other side, easily redirecting his comments on New York traffic and January slush and whether all pigeons should be deported from the usher to Pepper and Steve. If such a rapid-fire barrage of one-sided conversation had come from anyone else, Steve would have suspected they were having some sort of nervous episode, but he was coming to understand this was just Tony Stark’s way.

“Sunglasses,” Pepper demanded, talking over him as Steve was coming to understand was _her_ way. “And is that _vodka_?”

“Water,” Tony said, taking another swig. “The bar doesn’t open until intermission, no matter how much cash you try slipping the bartender. I’d admire the guy for his integrity if he hadn’t chosen the world’s stupidest place to take a stand. We need him in politics, or the priesthood, or the Peace Corps, somewhere he can put all that rectitude shoved up his rectum to good use instead of wielding it against innocent men who just want a fucking martini. What’s this show, _Giselle_? What’s it about? I can never follow the stories of these things, it’s like watching a bunch of mimes try to tell you what happened in _Twin Peaks_.”

“There’s a synopsis in the program,” Pepper said. “And give me your sunglasses.”

“Read it to me.” He chugged his water.

“‘On the day of a big festival, a nobleman disguises himself as a peasant to seduce the beautiful and naïve Giselle, who falls in love with him while wholly unaware of his true’—are you okay?”

Tony had choked on his water. Pepper rubbed his back with one hand while taking his sunglasses off with the other.

“I’ll get you more water,” Steve said, getting up to find an usher. Tony tried to say something— _you don’t have to_ or something to that effect—but given that he was coughing too hard to get the words out and there were tears in his eyes, Steve ignored him.

Tony seemed to have mostly recovered when he returned. “Thanks,” he said, taking the bottle Steve handed him. Their fingers brushed, and Tony jumped like he’d been electrocuted. “Thanks,” he said again, clearly trying to play it off. “Thank you. на здоровье.” He downed half the bottle in one go.

Steve kept feeling eyes on him throughout the first act, but every time he looked over, Tony’s gaze was glued religiously to the stage and a different weird expression was on his face. Like he was trying to keep from laughing while sucking on a lemon. Like he was seconds away from crying, and also chewing way too much taffy. Like someone had stabbed him seconds after he’d had the best orgasm of his life. Whatever he was feeling—agony, ecstasy, _sehnsucht_ , cocaine—he looked like he was feeling it a _lot_ , and was trying very hard to pretend he wasn’t. Steve supposed he could just be deeply moved by the dancers’ performance, but it seemed unlikely.

It happened again. This time Tony’s eye was twitching, and he was _humming_. Not the tune of the ballet, either—it sounded like _Row, Row, Row Your Boat_.

“I’m going to join the siege on the women’s bathroom,” Pepper announced at intermission.

“On your way, could you send me a—there’s one. Usher! I need you to run down to the bar and get me—where are my manners? Captain, what’s your order?”

“Whatever you’re having is fine.”

“Fantastic.” Tony turned back to the usher. “Pepper will want a glass of the Bâtard. I’ll have a vodka martini, but I want it in a pint glass. Hold the olives. Know what, hold the vermouth too.”

“So you want…a pint of vodka?”

“Fantastic,” Tony said again. “Here’s my card. That bartender, the only man standing between us and a world of chaos in which men get their drinks at eight instead of eight forty-five, the Sentinel of Probity—sorry, Cap, you’ve been replaced—”

“I think I’m supposed to be the Sentinel of Liberty.”

“His name is John,” the usher said.

“ _John_ ,” Tony muttered darkly, the same way Lex Luthor might mutter “Superman.” Steve took the opportunity to tell the usher, “Actually, I don’t want what he’s having. Could I get a scotch on the rocks?”

“And feel free to stint _John_ on the tip. On second thought—make it enormous, but in a way that says ‘fuck you.’ Like giving someone a hundred dollars in pennies. Obviously that one’s not gonna work with the card, but you’ll think of something. Or you could just say ‘fuck you,’ that’s pretty good. What’s your name? Pradeep? Get yourself something too, my treat. Thanks a million.”

“So how was your weekend?” Steve asked when Pradeep had left.

The entire plot of _Twin Peaks_ flashed across Tony’s face. “Fine. Boring. Can’t think of anything that would—how was yours?”

Iron Man’s cool metal hands gripping his hips. The taste of Iron Man’s hot skin. That single unmoderated “ _fuck_ ,” too hoarse and faint to be of qualitative help, but tinged with a familiarity akin to déjà vu.

“Not boring,” Steve admitted, shifting in his seat. Tony made a noise that sounded like a whimper.

“Stupid stabby thing,” he muttered, pulling out the pin in his collar. He rolled it rapidly between his fingers, staring down at the empty stage even as he directed his words at Steve. “You’re living in DC, right?”

“Most days, yeah. Have you spent much time there?”

“Not really. Most of my visits have been work-related—greasing some palms, schmoozing some windbag, getting hauled before some subcommittee. I wouldn’t call it my favorite vacation spot.”

“Yeah, there’s a reason they call it the swamp,” Steve said. “I wasn’t sold myself at first, but Washington’s grown on me. It’s not all politics—it’s a great town for history, and its public spaces can’t be beat. You should come down and visit when you have the chance. I’ll take you around to some monuments, show you a good time.”

Tony was back to chugging water, but he gave a thumbs up.

“Ballet always makes me thirsty, must be something in the water,” he said when the bottle was empty.

“I take it you’re not exactly a regular attendee.”

“At the ballet? No. At the opera? Also no.” Tony paused. “I used to be, growing up. My mom loved the ballet. We’d do _The Nutcracker_ every year, of course, and Dad and I liked _Coppélia_ for the robots, but her favorite was _Cinderella_.”

“What was she like?” Steve asked. He’d wondered, from the moment he learned of Tony’s existence, about the woman who’d disconfirmed Howard’s bachelorhood several decades after most men of their generation had settled down. He figured she must have been extremely beautiful, not only because she’d caught Howard’s eye, but because the features of Tony’s face Steve couldn’t trace back to Howard were just as handsome as the ones he could.

“Not a morning person. God help you if you tried to get her up before ten—she’d start throwing things, whatever she could get her hands on. Generally that meant pillows, but once Dad got her a Fabergé egg for Mother’s Day and made the unwise decision to surprise her by leaving it on the bedside table.” Tony smiled, gaze lost in the middle distance, laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“And she was always late. You were lucky if she was getting out of the shower by the time she was supposed to be somewhere. Used to drive Dad crazy. Some of her friends tried telling her events started hours before they actually did, but she caught on too quick. She was smart—not like my dad, not like me, but in her own way. But she could be gullible, too. She got caught up in the Satanic panic of the eighties, made me throw away all my D&D games. Kind of ironic, since that’s where I hid my drugs.”

Tony looked sideways at Steve, the first time he’d made eye contact all night. His smile was crooked. “People only want to remember the good stuff. But the bad shit reminds me she was real. She was human. She existed in my life as a person before she was a memory.”

“I get that,” Steve said. His throat had gone tight. He coughed to clear it. “For a while after my mom died, every time I tried to call her to mind, all I could think of was the sound of her swallowing. It was always so _loud_. Eating soup with her was a goddamn nightmare. And it was the Depression, we had a _lot_ of soup.”

Tony laughed. Steve found himself caught by the way laughing softened the sardonic aspect of his face, opened him up, made him look so goddamn young, for all that he was (by some reckonings) more than fifteen years older. For the first time, Steve didn’t see Howard Stark mixed with some beautiful stranger. He just saw Tony.

Pradeep returned bearing a tray. “You got yourself a Shirley Temple?” Tony asked.

“Yes, sir. I’m on the clock until ten.”

“Very responsible. See, that’s the kind of ethical stance I can at least respect—”

Trying to hand Steve his scotch, Pradeep misjudged the balance of the remaining drinks. The tray tilted and he overcompensated, making a grab with the hand still holding the scotch. Everything fell.

Steve acted on reflex, catching the scotch glass in one hand and Pepper’s wine in the other. Unfortunately, he only had two hands. The Shirley Temple crashed to the floor with the tray, and the vodka fell directly into his lap.

Pradeep babbled apologies, while Steve reassured him everything was fine and Tony declared the whole thing a blessing in disguise. “Half the time vodka just makes me weepy.”

“And the other half it turns you into a stripper,” Pepper said, reappearing as if cued by the perfect setup.

Fortunately no glass had broken, so cleanup involved little more than picking up ice cubes. Tony sent Pradeep off with a revised order: “I’ll have what Steve’s having. And make your next Shirley Temple a double.”

Thanks to alcohol’s quick rate of evaporation and Pepper producing a towel seemingly out of thin air, Steve’s pants were well on their way to a full recovery, but the seat he’d been sitting in was still damp. “Just take mine,” Pepper said, sitting down on Tony’s other side.

“Well, hold on,” Tony said. “We could all move down one, make it a game of Ten in the Bed. Steve, you sit where Pepper was sitting, and Pepper, you switch with me—”

“Why? I’m already sitting, Steve’s already sitting. It’s fine. Act Two’s starting.”

Steve didn’t sense eyes on him at all during Act Two. Tony seemed to have gone rigid. Steve could feel tension radiating off him like a field of electricity; he was surprised not to feel a static shock where their shoulders touched. (Steve had wide shoulders; it was hard not to encroach.) He wondered what had made Tony so suddenly uncomfortable—or, inversely, why he’d appeared to relax during intermission, only to snap back to this—but he didn’t wonder long, because he was soon distracted by the eerie romanticism of the ballet’s second act.

Nothing up to this point had stirred particularly strong memories, but this—the spectral whirl of the wilis—he remembered. He’d been fifteen, bored as he waited in the wings for Bucky to finish making love to the makeup girl. (In the 1930s, “making love” just meant kissing. That was one semantic shift Steve learned the hard way.) Never having seen a ballet before, it had surprised him to realize that the dancers were telling a _story_ , and even more that it was such a captivatingly dark one, with its vengeful maiden spirits who danced men to death and drowned them in lakes. A manager had discovered Steve and Bucky backstage and thrown them out before the ending. Now Steve found himself holding his breath to see how it all resolved—whether Giselle would manage to save Albrecht from those who would punish him for the wrongs he’d done her, whether he would accept the redemption she offered, whether this love story would prove to be a tragic one.

It was late when they emerged into the lobby, the standing ovations having gone on long and loud. Pepper surreptitiously wiped her eyes. She laughed a little when she saw that Steve had caught her. “No matter how many times I’ve seen it, no matter how many versions or variations of the same silly story…it still gets me.”

“It was great,” Steve said. “That Misty Copeland is really something.”

“Isn’t she? I’ve never seen the peasant _pas de deux_ so buoyant.”

“I liked when they got married at the end,” Tony said. Steve and Pepper exchanged a look, but Tony kept talking before either of them could ask what animated musical adaptation he’d seen that in. “I gotta piss like a racehorse. That’s a phrase, right? Or am I thinking of hung like a…” He walked off without finishing his sentence.

“Sir, your card!” Pradeep called.

“Keep it,” Tony said, blowing past him, “Get yourself a lifetime supply of Shirley Temples, register for a dance class, buy a boat.”

Steve opened his mouth, thought better of it, then opened it again anyway. “I know I don’t know Tony that well, but is he being…weird?”

“Tony’s always weird.” Pepper sighed. “But he’s definitely being weirder than usual. It could be anything. Maybe something blew up in the lab. Maybe he got turned down by a Top Model. Maybe they canceled _Drag Race_. I’m sure it has nothing to do with you.”

“Who’s that?”

Steve looked up, feeling like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar—or more aptly, like the kid caught doodling in math class he’d been so many times. Now that he had Photoshop on his tablet, it was too easy to open the app during meetings and let people think he was taking notes. All day he’d been paying half-attention to presentations while attempting to draw Iron Man’s face.

It was a frustrating, fruitless exercise, playing both sketch artist and witness and not doing well at either. He was still adjusting to drawing digitally, the stylus awkward in his hands, the screen providing none of the tactile feedback he was used to. But he had so little to go on it hardly mattered. He’d sketched dozens of faces, any one of which _could_ conceivably be Iron Man’s, none of which conceivably _were_. The only consistent feature was the facial hair, and he wouldn’t stake his life on having precisely mapped out its borders. Though his study of Iron Man’s mouth had been zealous—probing, even—he found it difficult to translate physical recollection into visual output. One file he’d filled just with noses, trying to extrapolate from the handful of times Iron Man’s nose had bumped his or pressed into his cheek, until the very concept of the human nose started to seem ridiculous and unlikely.

He had no way of knowing the color of Iron Man’s hair, the look of his eyes, the shade of his skin. Well—that last one wasn’t exactly true. Technically speaking, he had laid eyes on quite a bit of Iron Man’s bare skin. He could probably render a fairly accurate image from memory, if he tried, but he lacked conviction that running a search on a sketch of Iron Man’s erection like some sort of modern pornographic retelling of _Cinderella_ would be of much use.

Steve’s most recent attempt to capture Iron Man’s face looked like the lovechild of Howard Stark and Charlie Chaplin. He grimaced. “No one, technically. No one real.”

“It’s very good,” Thor said. In street clothes and with his hair pulled back, Mjolnir disguised as an umbrella, he looked more like a modern New Yorker than Steve felt. “Not that I’m any great judge of art. I always wanted to be a skald—a warrior poet. But I have no bent for clever turns of phrase. My brother, though—with his silver tongue, war and poetry have always been one and the same. He can craft an insult that will cut you deeper than a thousand knives, and rhyme besides.”

Thor’s smile faded. He cleared his throat, harsh. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t—Loki is a criminal. A murderer.”

“It’s all right,” Steve said. He tried to imagine himself in Thor’s place. If someone he loved like a brother had done what Loki did, would he have been able to cut all ties binding their heart to his? He couldn’t imagine a scenario in which he would have stopped caring for Bucky. Of course, he also couldn’t imagine a scenario in which Bucky became a mass murderer, but still.

“Loki’s…shapeshifting thing,” he said. “Did he do that a lot when you were growing up?”

“Oh yeah,” Thor said, unable to keep his smile from returning. “All the time. Once he disguised himself as a shapely maiden to trick me into a hydra’s lair.”

“A hydra,” Steve repeated. “As in a giant multiheaded snake monster.”

“Yeah, exactly. It nearly killed me, too.” Steve’s expression must have indicated that he didn’t find this anecdote quite as charming as Thor seemed to, because Thor hastened to add, “It was just mischief. He didn’t really want me dead. I mean—” He grimaced. “Maybe he did. But in his own way, I think it was a sort of gift? He knows I love snakes. He knows I love—loved—a challenge.”

“I know you said he wasn’t always as…” Steve considered various options—evil, psychotic, deranged—and settled on “…extreme. But even before, all his lying and playing tricks, how did that not drive you crazy?”

“It did,” Thor said. “He drove me up the wall. Every day he found a new way to make a fool of me, often in front of the entire kingdom. There were times I thought I might wring his neck.”

“But?”

“But.” Thor paused, weighing his words. “Once, when we were children, Loki ran into the throne room yelling that there was a giant wolf in the lower town. We all went rushing out, weapons drawn, but there was no sign of it. The town was perfectly calm. No one else had seen it. The next day, the same thing happened.”

“Your brother is the boy who cried wolf?” Steve said, disbelieving.

Thor looked confused. “You know this story?”

“I—never mind. Go on.”

“Those who hadn’t learned to mistrust Loki on the first occasion learned on the second. A few openhearted souls even held out to the third. I was the only one who went with him on the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, and the seventh.”

“In case there really was a wolf?”

Thor huffed a laugh. “No. Giant wolves have been extinct in Asgard for over a thousand years. I found that out the first night, when I came home to Mother wondering where everyone had gone. I didn’t tell Loki I knew, though. He must have thought I was the most gullible idiot in all the Nine Realms.”

“Why did you let him?”

Thor shrugged. “No matter how many times he lied to me, deceived me, tricked me, made a fool of me, betrayed me…I wanted him to know it didn’t make a difference. I’d still come when he called. I’d be at his side to face down any giant wolf that threatened him, even if it was totally imaginary.”

Thor’s smile was brittle, bittersweet. “I don’t trust Loki. I learned that lesson well, many times over. And I’m sure I’ll learn it many more. No matter how many times he stabs me in the back, I’ll keep handing him the knife.”

“That doesn’t sound like…the healthiest relationship.”

Thor barked a laugh. “No. That it’s not. My mother always said love and trust should go hand in hand. When you love someone you can’t possibly trust, what then? Either you make yourself stop loving them, or you make yourself trust them.” He shrugged. “I can’t _really_ manage the second, but I can get a whole lot closer than I can with the first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter in my notes: "greatest _Giselle_ performance ever but sadly Tony will never know"


	8. holding out for a hero

Steve couldn’t move. His wrists were cuffed behind his back, ankles shackled to chair legs. The world was dark—blindfolded. Mouth taped shut. Captured. Kidnapped.

_Iron Man_ , he thought—wishful thinking, a sign he was developing a one-track mind, or a fair guess given that Iron Man had dispossessed him of both sight and mobility on previous occasions—it made no difference as memory flooded back.

He’d been swimming laps at the Triskelion, a pool being one amenity his gym lacked. Somewhere around lap two hundred he noticed himself getting lightheaded. His first, instinctual thought was that he was having an asthma attack; his second, logical thought was that his last asthma attack had occurred in 1943. He got out of the pool.

The door was locked. The scanner recognized his handprint, but declared he didn’t have the clearance it needed to open. Either SHIELD had installed top secret showerheads sometime in the last hour, or something more sinister was going on.

The door was thick, heavy steel. Steve could take it out, but at the rate gas was filling the room—and thus, his lungs—it might wind him more than he’d like. He had no way of knowing what waited on the other side. It might be more gas, a heavily armed strike team; it probably wasn’t his clothes and shield. Whoever was doing this clearly had control over at least a portion of SHIELD’s systems. Why waste energy when he could let them come to him?

Steve lay down on a lounger, draped a towel over his head, and concentrated on taking shallow breaths. He didn’t have to wait long. He catalogued by sound: filtered breathing, heavy but cautious footsteps, the crackle of Taser rods, the hum of magnetic handcuffs.

“You sure he’s down?”

“’Course I’m sure. Dosage we pumped in, we’re lucky he didn’t drown. Turn him over so I can get the cuffs on.”

A hand on his shoulder sounded the starting bell. Steve flipped the guy trying to flip him over over him. He used the towel to twist the Taser rods out of another guy’s hands. Guys three and four went in the pool.

“More gas, more gas!” somebody yelled.

Steve’s vision was already darkening around the edges when he got put in a chokehold that made everything go black. His fingers scrabbled at the heavy arm around his neck, then grasped a gas mask. He ripped it off. The chokehold slackened instantly, allowing him to wrench free of his attacker with an elbow to the gut. He spun around to land the knockout blow, but there was no need. The guy had already fallen to his knees. He was swaying—or maybe Steve was swaying—maybe they were both swaying. So much gas filled the room that it resembled a sauna, blurring Steve’s vision as much with physical materiality as with the affect it was having on his brain.

A baton came at him from a cloud, but he caught the wrist swinging it. He was surprised he did. He seemed to be moving with dreamlike slowness, actions no longer synced to thoughts; he felt as though he were watching a slow-motion film of a fight he’d already lost. How long had that Taser been pressed into his hip, pumping electricity through his body?

The fight had kept going, Steve remembered, but it couldn’t have been too much longer before he passed out. It didn’t feel like much time had passed—though he would have said the same the last time he woke in an unfamiliar room without being able to recall exactly how he’d gotten there. His head hurt and he could taste blood in his mouth, but the haze seemed to have completely cleared from his mind.

Voices were speaking nearby, low and factious. Steve kept his head down, pretending he was still passed out. It had been clear from the initial attack that they were aiming to capture, not kill him, but for what ultimate purpose? Information? Leverage? Ransom? Forced matrimony? (That last one seemed unlikely, but Thor had made it sound like such a real and terrifying possibility.)

Whatever competence his abductors had demonstrated in staging their attack in the very heart of SHIELD, they evidently left back at the Triskelion. Specifically, Steve gathered, one man seemed to have been the lynchpin of their plan, the only one who knew in complete detail what the plan actually _was_ —and apparently he was the one he’d relieved of his mask.

After less than five minutes of eavesdropping, Steve felt like he knew as much as the remaining conspirators did. There was a bug. That bug was hidden somewhere in this building, the International Spy Museum (which was only a few minutes’ drive from the Triskelion, so he probably hadn’t been out very long after all). The men wanted to retrieve the information stored on the bug, but what that information pertained to or what the bug looked like neither they, nor Steve, had any idea.

And as for what Steve had to do with any of this—apparently the man with the plan (not to be confused with the star-spangled man with the plan, who was Steve, though he’d never thought carrying a flag from Hoboken to Spokane counted as much of a plan) had promised to reveal that bit of knowledge once they had the bug. Two of the men claimed that it had something to do with Steve’s blood, but disagreed on whether the plan involved taking some _out_ or adding something _in_.

Steve sensed Iron Man’s arrival one second before the men did, despite being blindfolded. It wasn’t a sound that alerted him as much as an absence of sound, a sort of sucking-in of the air right before— _boom._

This was becoming a pattern, Iron Man blasting windows to gain entrance to a room Steve was in, like a high-octane version of the guy in a movie throwing pebbles at his girl’s bedroom window. Steve didn’t know how he kept getting cast as the dame—first Princess Peach, then Juliet, now some sort of cross between Donna Reed and Pearl White. (As though it wasn’t bad enough that his mental image of Iron Man looked like a blend of Howard Stark and Charlie Chaplin, Steve’s subconscious helpfully added Jimmy Stewart and Crane Wilbur into the mix. Things had been much simpler when he’d suspected Iron Man of being a robot.)

It was hard to track the fight as anything more than a violent cacophony, but he got the impression that Iron Man was mopping the floors with the kidnappers. A body slammed into the back of his chair. His fingers closed on fabric—the back of a collar. The man tried pulling away, but Steve held tight. Elsewhere, Iron Man was shooting energy beams that lit up the edges of his blindfold.

The guy whose collar he gripped had given up on choking himself and was now making what seemed like an attempt to squirm out of his shirt. “Thanks, Cap,” Iron Man said, grabbing the guy; this time Steve let go.

“If you wanted to see me again, you could’ve just said,” Iron Man said when he’d returned from dumping the conspirators. “You didn’t have to go get kidnapped.”

“Mmph,” Steve replied. He’d managed to unstick the tape from most of his mouth, but it was holding fast at one corner. Iron Man ripped it off. “How’d you know to find me?”

“A little bird told me. It sang a whole song about you needing a hero. Very Disney princess, which checks out—you did the Sleeping Beauty thing, I came to visit you in a tower, showed you a whole new world. Abraham Erskine wasn’t secretly a sea witch, was he?”

“I thought you were a villain, not a hero.”

“That’s what I told Birdie Tyler. But then it said you were basically naked, which—let’s talk about this. Did I miss a striptease? Is it my birthday? How much for a lap dance?”

“ _Is_ it your birthday?”

Iron Man paused. “If I say yes, is the lap dance free?”

“If you can provide an official photo ID, sure.”

“Damn, I left my fake in the eighties.” Iron Man sighed. “You know, I’m not usually the jealous type, but it kind of hurts my feelings that you let yourself get kidnapped by somebody else.”

“‘Let’ is a bit of an exaggeration,” Steve said drily. “There was a chemical inducement.”

“They drugged you?”

“It wore off a while—”

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

The impact of the look Steve gave him was probably hampered by the blindfold. “How many fingers am _I_ holding up?”

“One.”

“Wow.” Steve was impressed despite himself. “You do that with X-ray vision, or—”

“Experience has taught me to always assume people are flipping me off behind my back. Or behind your back, whatever. What’s today’s date?”

“Not your birthday, apparently.”

“Who’s the president?”

“Roosevelt.” Steve let a beat pass. “What, you’re not gonna ask which one?”

“I…”

“I’m kidding. It’s Obama.”

Iron Man let out an audible breath. “You’re a punk, anyone ever told you that?”

“Once or twice.”

“I should put the tape back on.”

“Or,” Steve suggested, “you could take the rest of this stuff off.”

“See, most people would assume by ‘the rest of this stuff’ you mean the blindfold and cuffs. But as you so astutely pointed out, I’m a villain, so…I take it you mean the swimsuit.”

Steve licked his lips. Iron Man had gotten closer; in the darkness, his voice seemed to manifest directly in Steve’s head.

“Give me a month,” he said.

“…What?”

“Your birthday. Just tell me what month.”

“Do you get all your interrogation strategies from Guess Who?” Iron Man sounded torn between amusement and disbelief. “Here’s a freebie: I’m not wearing a hat.”

Steve didn’t know how to express that wanting to know Iron Man’s birth month wasn’t really about solving the mystery of his secret identity, any more than asking about his childhood cat had been the first step in a plan to mine old veterinary records. It had more to do with something Tony Stark had said at the ballet. Those stories about his mother—he’d called them examples of “the bad shit,” but that was cynicism talking. They were no more than the average person’s foibles. But the way Tony told them—that distant smile on his face, the details of the Fabergé egg and the D&D game—had made them anything but average. They were specific. Personal. _Human_.

Steve’s attempts to draw Iron Man’s face had been exercises in negative space, mapping out touch memories of contour and surface. He’d felt more like a sculptor than a painter, a blind Michelangelo trying to free David from the rock. He wanted to know the kind of details that made Iron Man more than just a silhouette. It wasn’t about unmasking him. It was about constructing an image.

Saying any of that would give too much away. Steve was a soldier, not a spy, but getting abducted to the International Spy Museum served as a somewhat on-the-nose reminder that those things were hardly mutually exclusive. This _thing_ with Iron Man—whatever it was—could only be conducted as a covert operation. However flimsy Steve’s cover may have been, he did have one, and he couldn’t risk blowing it, not yet.

So instead he said, “I don’t know how many interrogations you’ve been involved in, but generally the interrogator isn’t the guy shackled to a chair.”

Iron Man lifted his chin with a finger. “I’m a Gemini,” he said, and then came the familiar _whirr_ of the faceplate retreating.

Steve smiled against Iron Man’s lips. He had no idea what month Gemini corresponded to nor what supposed traits. He didn’t care. The kiss was deep and lingering, Iron Man’s tongue mapping out the negative space of Steve’s mouth.

The faceplate locking back into place was a subtly different sound, more _clink_ , but equally familiar. “Yeah, I’m definitely thinking it’s a no on setting you free, sorry.” It was hard to tell through the voice modulator, but Iron Man sounded vaguely breathless.

“So what _are_ you going to do?” Steve’s voice had gone deeper without him meaning it to.

Metallic hands curved over his knees. Steve shivered. “Excellent question. Normally, I’d try playing it cool to start, work my way through Little League and the Minors.” The hands slid up his thighs. Steve’s swimsuit only qualified as shorts on the technicality of an inch or two; by the time Iron Man encountered fabric, he had forayed about as far into Steve’s lap as it was possible to go. “But.”

“But?”

“I haven’t been able to think of anything but your cock for weeks.”

Steve let out a breath. “Weeks, huh?”

“It’s been especially bad recently—you can probably guess why.” Iron Man’s hands left his legs, then returned unarmored. His skin was hot and calloused. Steve’s pulse quickened. “Not that it wasn’t bad to start with. But you know when it got _really_ bad?”

Steve couldn’t follow this convoluted timeline of badness, but luckily the question was rhetorical. “Hammer’s party. You in that old uniform…I would’ve stuck around longer, but I didn’t trust myself not to go down on my knees in the middle of the wreckage.”

A noise escaped Steve’s throat. He was starting to feel lightheaded in a way that had nothing to do with a chemical substance being piped in.

“It’s literally all I’ve been able to think about,” Iron Man continued, running his bare hands over Steve’s thighs, around the back of his knees, down his calves, up again. Steve was almost painfully hard already. “Having you in my mouth. Sucking you off. Swallowing your come. I haven’t thought this much about giving a blowjob since college, when I was voted Most Likely to Deepthroat. That’s true, by the way. They printed it in the yearbook.”

“Prove it,” Steve said roughly.

Iron Man did. Steve had received his own superlative in high school—Most Likely to Say Please and Thank You—and he lived up to it now, albeit with a lot of _fuck_ s thrown in. Iron Man sucked cock with a single-minded zeal, so eager and relentless that Steve suspected he’d really meant it when he said he’d thought of nothing else for weeks. If he brought a fraction of this drive to more typically supervillainous pursuits—like, say, trying to take over the world—Steve may as well concede defeat now. As it was, he bit back a needy moan, fingers flexing with the desire to tangle in Iron Man’s hair.

Cool air and a disorienting _clink_ interrupted the pleasure building low in his abdomen. “Hey, I have a fun idea,” Iron Man said.

Minutes later, he was climbing into Steve’s lap. “Are you sure you’re ready?” Steve asked, an attempt at consideration somewhat belied by his ragged breathing. “That wasn’t a lot of prep time.”

“Oh my god, you _are_ worse than the suit.”

“You’re still taking care of that burn, right?” Steve said, mostly to provoke him—an ambition which immediately went out the window as Iron Man sank onto his cock.

“ _Steve_ ,” Iron Man groaned. “God, you feel so—” He couldn’t seem to find the right word, so he finished the sentence with a roll of his hips instead. Steve couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in such complete agreement with a sentiment.

When he’d first come to, his concern had been that the magnetism binding his hands together might be too powerful for him to break. Now he had to keep himself from pulling too hard for fear of the opposite. Every inch of his body yearned to get closer, to drive _up_ and _in_ to all that tight heat, to grab Iron Man by the hips and slam himself home. It was torture—exquisite, excruciating torture—to sit rooted in place while Iron Man rode him like jockey tryouts were today and he’d put all his money on Steve finishing first.

He did, of course, breaking apart like the shattering of a window, spilling wet into the man who said Steve’s name like a prayer but wouldn’t confess his own.

He was too fuzzed out to raise a grievance when Iron Man demonstrated easy control of his restraints, detaching him from the chair and having him kneel, still cuffed, on the floor. Steve expected—anticipated, even—the press of Iron Man’s erection against his lips, not the warm touch of a hand stroking his cheek, cupping his jaw, pushing into his hair.

“God, look at you,” Iron Man murmured as Steve leaned instinctively into his touch. He wondered how much of the armor Iron Man had shed, whether he was fully naked except for the helmet. “You’re fucking incredible. I don’t deserve this.”

Which was exactly the kind of sentiment Steve had gotten sick of seeing all over the Internet. It always seemed to crop up in response to articles about him, whether the subject was how he’d donated sixty-seven years of backpay to POW/MIA organizations or photos of him petting a dog. _We don’t deserve Captain America_ , usually accompanied by those crying emojis. He knew they meant well, but it rankled him, and the more he encountered it the more it came to piss him off. With so much shit in the world—99% of it, if Natasha was to be believed—what sort of self-defeating response was _we don’t deserve this_ to anything nice? What good did that attitude do anyone?

So Steve said, “I want you to,” and then added “please,” because the better part of a century may have passed since high school but he was nothing if not consistent.

Iron Man made a choked-off sound, and then his erection _was_ pressing against Steve’s lips, pushing into his mouth, his fingers curling in Steve’s hair tight enough to hurt. Last time Steve had stayed still and let Iron Man fuck into his mouth; this time he let Iron Man guide his head up and down his length, a different shade of acquiescence.

“I take it back—you should get kidnapped more often. Jesus. Fucking— _fuck_.”

Before this whole thing had started, Steve wouldn’t have mentioned blindfolds or handcuffs as particular turn-ons. He still wouldn’t want them to feature in _every_ sexual encounter, but he couldn’t deny the eroticism of having a world of sensation narrowed to _this_ : a heavy weight on his tongue, the slip and slide of smooth skin, the sharp tang of leaking precome. He let out an inadvertent moan, felt it vibrate along Iron Man’s shaft. Iron Man’s hips stuttered. Steve’s next moan was advertent.

Iron Man’s babbling had evolved into a broken litany of promises that he would come to a kidnapped Steve’s rescue “through the wind and— _fuck_ —the, uh, chill and the rain and the—the—the—the storm and oh holy fucking _God_ —”

How Iron Man’s train of thought had arrived at what sounded to Steve like the creed of the United States Postal Service, he couldn’t imagine. Despite his point about not being in a position to play interrogator, if he asked _now_ , in _this_ position, with Iron Man rambling putty in his hands—well, in his mouth—he might get him to spill his secrets before spilling his semen. Of course, Steve would have to stop blowing him to ask. Natasha had warned him he’d have to decide what compromises he was willing to make.

Apparently this wasn’t one of them. Iron Man’s taste flooded Steve’s mouth. He moaned something unintelligible about fire and blood, and then— _whirr_ —kissed Steve filthy and feverish. A sigh escaped Steve’s lips, an innocent sound totally at odds with the obscene thrill of Iron Man licking his own come from the crevices of his mouth.

Steve’s swimsuit was still pushed down around his thighs. He felt himself growing hard again, a situation not alleviated by his dick rubbing against the bare skin of Iron Man’s stomach. “Sorry,” he mumbled into Iron Man’s lips.

_Clink_. “Sorry for what?” Iron Man demanded.

Startled and kiss-drunk, it took Steve a moment to know himself. “For getting—uh. It just doesn’t seem fair. For me to get off twice. Again.”

A moment’s silence passed. Iron Man could have blown away in a cloud of dust without Steve knowing. Then: “Jesus Christ, you fucking _saint_ ,” Iron Man growled, grabbing Steve’s erection. Steve yelped, startled again, though this time in a wholly unobjectionable manner.

_Whirr_. Iron Man kissed him fiercely, hand pumping Steve’s cock.

_Clink_. “Where did they even _find_ you?”

_Whirr_. “Brooklyn,” Steve gasped as Iron Man bit down on his lower lip.

_Clink_. “I can’t believe your come is _dripping out of my ass_ —”

The noise Steve made would have been embarrassing if he hadn’t already left embarrassment far behind. He came in long ropes, painting Iron Man’s hand like Jackson Pollock. He must have missed a _whirr_ , because Iron Man was peppering his face with kisses.

_Clink_. “No judgement,” Iron Man said, once Steve had recovered to the point where his panting had abated but he was still dependent on Iron Man keeping him upright. “Do you have a museum kink? Is that what this is? Were you a Monuments Men?”

“I didn’t choose to come here,” Steve pointed out, brain running too sluggishly to warn him against the double entendre. It must not have been worth remarking on by Iron Man’s standards; he squeezed Steve’s shoulders with an interested hum, as though he’d been so focused on other parts of him that he was just now realizing he’d neglected to show his delts proper appreciation.

With a manful effort, Steve pushed away, leaning back on his heels. Iron Man made a petulant sound. “We have to find—there’s a bug. They were talking about a bug that’s hidden here.”

He hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but in an abstract way he’d been assuming he’d be able to destroy any records of what went down in the building before anyone else had the chance to access them. It only now occurred to him, dread twisting sick in his stomach, that “bug” might mean “live transmission.”

“No need to worry about your good name, Cap,” Iron Man said, reading his mind. “I ran a surveillance scan when I got here. The Super Soldier Liberation Army disabled all the security cams. And I left them in the Cone of Silence—that’s not me being clever, there’s a Get Smart exhibit across the hall.”

“Okay, good.” Steve let out a breath. “That’s good. We still oughta find the bug, though.”

“That could be a tall order.” Iron Man got to his feet, armor audibly reassembling. “Looking for a bug in the International Spy Museum sounds a lot like looking for a needle in a stack of needles. Let’s see—we got a microphone hidden in a shoe. Recorder hidden in a briefcase. Camera disguised as a lighter. Pistol disguised as a lighter. Lipstick pistol. Ring pistol. Camera ring. Dragonfly ring. Briefcase pistol—”

“Hold on—”

“Do you think these guys just pulled words from a hat? They’ve got a compass disguised as a watch _and_ a watch disguised as a compass. At that point you gotta know you’re playing Calvinball.”

“Dragonfly ring,” Steve said. “What’s that?”

“Pretty much what it sounds—okay. I see your point. ‘Insectothopter’—terrible name—‘developed by the NRP for the CIA,’ blah blah, ‘aerial drone,’ ‘dirty pulse’— _that’s_ interesting—‘smart homing,’ which explains the ring—wonder what the radius is like—‘electret condenser microphone,’ probably Knowles, even the Stasi used the BT-series—”

“So it’s a bug,” Steve interrupted.

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah, basically. Want me to get it? Usually when someone I’ve slept with starts dropping hints about wanting a ring I take it as a signal to run, but…”

A slight foreboding had arisen in Steve’s gut, a feeling he remembered from Hammer’s party. He was still blindfolded, still handcuffed, still…exposed. Iron Man had half-heartedly attempted to clean them up with the duct tape he’d pulled off Steve’s mouth, only succeeding in spreading the mess further. And now it sounded like he was using a laser to cut into the exhibit case, not having waited for Steve to respond.

Iron Man was a supervillain. What if he was planning to take off with the bug, leaving Steve in this debauched state?

Steve shifted backwards, grasping for a weapon.

“Oh, sorry, Cap,” Iron Man said, coming over. He tucked Steve into his swimsuit. “There you go. Bad news: the ring doesn’t fit over the armor, not even on the pinky.”

Steve let out a breath, feeling simultaneously relieved and guilty for his suspicions. Iron Man disengaged the cuffs’ magnetism, finally freeing Steve’s hands from behind his back—then immediately reengaged them in front of his body. “So I think I’ll take it with me to get it resized. See you at—I dunno, the Newseum? Lincoln Memorial? Your pick—”

Steve drove his bound wrists up into Iron Man’s elbow, breaking the cuffs apart. He heard the faint whistle of the ring flying through the air. A there-and-gone buzzing near his head indicated the dragonfly had detached itself, probably to seek out the safety of some high corner.

Smart homing meant the drone would always return to the ring; that was all he needed to get. Before he could shove off the blindfold, his wrist slammed into the wall and stuck.

“Look, I’ll _tell_ you if the bug says anything cool,” Iron Man said. “Probably. It depends how gossipy I’m feeling.”

Steve grasped around with his other hand. His fingers closed on the handle of an umbrella. He swung it as hard as he could, expecting it to break on Iron Man’s armor, maybe buying him a distraction long enough to wrench free.

The umbrella didn’t break. It made a _bang_.

“Did you just _shoot_ me? With an _umbrella_?”

Steve succeeded in pulling his wrist from the wall—and in sticking the cuffs back together in front of him. He was ping-ponging between Scylla and Charybdis, but at least now he had an umbrella. He dived for where he’d heard the ring land. A percussive force knocked him aside.

“I thought our fighting was _foreplay_ ,” Iron Man complained. “I just wanna go home and take a nap—”

“Then let me have the ring,” Steve grunted, landing a kick to Iron Man’s—well, he couldn’t tell, but it definitely landed.

Getting knocked down had lost him the sense of where the ring was. He tried to edge toward a wall to reorient. His foot made contact with something small and round and metal.

Iron Man barreled into him, slamming him against the wall. The umbrella clattered to the ground. Iron Man pried Steve’s fingers open with both hands.

The ring slid from both their grasps, bouncing across the floor. They dived at the same time. Then they were wrestling, grappling, rolling over and over—Iron Man had the ring—now Steve—Iron Man again—

_Whirr_. _Clink_.

Steve sat up, straddling Iron Man’s hips. “Did you just _swallow_ it?”

“C’mon, you know me. I _always_ swallow.” Iron Man sounded like he was wearing a shit-eating grin.

Steve groaned. Iron Man pushed at his hips and he moved off. There was no use continuing to fight now, not unless he wanted to try pulling a reverse kidnapping.

While still blindfolded. And handcuffed.

Iron Man sat up too. “You know, the _last_ time I had to pop a ring in my mouth it was because a waiter mixed up which champagne went to which table—”

He stopped talking abruptly. _Whirr_.

Steve didn’t hesitate. He surged forward and kissed Iron Man deeply, filthily, _thoroughly_.

As he’d suspected, Iron Man hadn’t swallowed the ring.

Steve resisted the urge to don his own smug grin when he pulled away. Barely.

A beat passed during which he wondered if their wrestling match was about to resume, this time tongues-only. Then came a _clink_ and a suit-processed sigh.

“Fine, you win. Now tell me—do I need to go to a Happydale far, far away, or does this guy look like Boris Karloff?”

The blindfold was pulled away. Steve blinked. In front of him was what could only be the Cone of Silence, crammed with the bodies of half a dozen unconscious men. One of whom was Tony Stark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't wanna accidentally gaslight anybody—I've done a teensy-weensy bit of editing of previous chapters, so if you happen across a line of dialogue you swear wasn't there before I promise you're not going crazy. (I also promise that it's nothing so exciting that you should feel the need to go back and look.)
> 
> I'm behind in replying to comments, mostly because the longer and more thoughtful the comment the longer and more thoughtful I want my reply to be and y'all have _blessed_ me lately. I'm not going through the easiest time rn, & I just want to say an extra warm and heartfelt thank you to everyone who's commented because your words really have helped immeasurably. ♥ ♥

**Author's Note:**

> I can't say how much it means to me to have people reading & engaging with & commenting on this fic, now that I'm finally fulfilling at least some small part of my Steve/Tony obsession of 2012. (obviously that obsession never went _away_ —they never do—it just went dormant for a while, scared back into its hole by the one-two punch of phase 2 and the December release of _Les Miserables_.)
> 
> we'll blame the quarantine for me being even more desperate for fannish connection than usual: I love your comments! I love talking MCU and Steve and Tony and the whole shebang (well, _he_ bang—well, _they_ bang, but not quite yet, that comes later. so do they. bah-dum-tss). consider this me programming my name with a winky face into your phone and telling you to call anytime, not just for ~~tech~~ fic stuff. ♥ ♥ ♥

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Cover Art for "The Corruption of Captain America by the Villain Tony Stark"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24228526) by [arthur_pendragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arthur_pendragon/pseuds/arthur_pendragon)




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